Daljit Rehal, chief digital and information officer at HMRC was the key speaker at a session on Optimising Digitisation in the Tax Administration with added input from Jonathan Athow, director general of customer strategy and tax design at the 20 Years of HMRC event.

‘We are recognising [HMRC] that we need to be more efficient and to use our limited resources in a more efficient way,’ Rehal said. ‘We need to be customer centric, we need to help customers get their tax right first time.’

He then explained that working with partners and their clients is essential to making this succeed.

Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax and agent services were top of the agenda.

Rehal said: ‘Almost all agents use online services to interact with us, with 62%-65% of agents rating us positively, but we recognise we’ve got work to do here, so we’ve invested £36m in the modernisation of HMRC tax advisor registration services, we’ve enhanced our digital transaction services so agents can see and do what their clients want, eg, the income record viewer.’

As well as this, artificial intelligence (AI) was heavily discussed, with Rehal running through an example of building an application programming interface (API) in minutes. HMRC is currently developing 17 GenAI programmes for use by staff and taxpayers, such as the gov.uk chatbot which is still in its trial phase, voice recognition and Microsoft CoPilot.

Rehal explained: ‘We’ll be using this technology ourselves internally in HMRC to shortcut some of our project delivery timelines and to become more agile.

‘Through this I think there is going to be an explosion in productivity, but we need to make sure it’s done safely with guardrails.’

This will lead to many programmers worrying about the future of the profession, but Rehal noted, ‘it’s not taking away the need for programmers or architects, it’s just allowing them to get there quicker’.

Rehal was asked about a one user login system for digital services for agents, which he said was ‘on our road map, but we’re not quite there yet’, confirming that HMRC was working with other government departments on this. However, no timeframe was confirmed.

The discussion then moved onto the business sector, and whether HMRC was moving forwards with MTD having a system for corporation tax and VAT so agents did not have to log out then back into the alternate system.

Rehal replied: ‘It is really about getting all of our customer information joined up and all of their financial information joined up, but not necessarily in the same place.’ He then asked Jonathan Athow, director general customer strategy and tax design to contribute to some of the session.

Athol said: ‘We want agents to see everything the customer can, part of the challenge here is to distinguish the order we do things, so MTD for VAT was our ability move everyone over to ETMP [enterprise tax management platform], MTD for self assessment and non-mandatory groups, so we are going in that direction and as we do that our agent services will add more functionality.’

Athol added that to get all of this out and working is going to be a ‘challenge’.

Paul Aplin OBE, vice president of CIOT, then asked HMRC to ‘share the problem’ with agents to create a less clunky system for all, also asking for more information about the agent registration system HMRC is building.

Aplin said: ‘The agent registration process that you are building, one of my big frustrations with this discussion on regulating the profession over the last few years has been that I don’t think you have got good enough data to know what the problem is and where it is, and it is certainly not good enough to convince everybody who needs to be convinced.’

Rehal agreed that agents needed to be involved, saying: ‘In a digital paradigm you would be in those workshops with us saying, “I need this step and this step”, but with such a large population we can’t get everyone in a workshop to take that forward.

‘I’m inviting you in to not do this on our own, it would be great to hear your ideas.’