Earlier this Fall, I attended the HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) Third-Party Developer Conference at the Royal Society in London. HMRC is a non-ministerial department of the UK Government responsible for the administration and collection of direct taxes, including income tax and corporation tax, indirect taxes including value-added tax, and environmental taxes. These are activities that are very relevant to the small businesses that Intuit serves.
HMRC is becoming a digital organization. They are introducing digital tax accounts for all UK businesses and individuals, which will give customers a personalized user experience and show exactly whats owed. They are also going through a full platform transformation and will open data and expose new set of RESTful APIs that allow developers to bring more sophisticated software products to market, while generating greater competition in the software industry, resulting in more choice for customers. The reason behind this transformation is to maximize revenue, improve customer experience, and minimize costs of service, which seem super high on their existing stack. You can read more about the API strategy here.
I was blown away to see that a governmental organization uses the best-in-class services model, tools, and strategy. Frankly, if you replaced “HMRC” with “Intuit” on the slide deck, you might think that they were talking about our own platform and services strategy!
HMRC plans to deliver 21 services. Some that I consider most interesting to Intuit Developer and our partners are:
- Digital tax accounts for all UK businesses and individuals
- Digital Self Assessment (SA)
- Corporation Tax (CT)
- VAT Online (VAT Returns)
- Pension Schemes
- Pay as You Earn (PAYE) RTI, which includes:
- Incoming transactions – RTI submissions, and Expenses and Benefits (EXB)
- Outgoing notifications – Data Provisioning Service (DPS)
Going forward, I plan to continue to participate in the HMRC developer group and look forward to gaining access to their sandbox and APIs in the coming months.
You can learn more about HMRC at these links:
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