Following discussion with professional bodies, HMRC is running a beta test with a number of accountancy firms with up to 1,000 clients to provide feedback on how the system would work in practice.

‘The plan is to release the functionality to a small number of agents at first, as part of a private beta to test everything is working as it should. If successful, it will be rolled out to the wider agent community shortly after,’ HMRC said.

‘We are testing this new feature with tax agents of varying size and feedback to date has been positive.’

At the moment there is no functionality in the agent services account to allow agents to control who in their firms can access client information.