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Making tax digital? Five things we’ve learned about HMRC’s Digital Transformation in 2025
HMRC has promised that from 2026 it will transform the way it uses digital tools to tackle tax evasion and interface with taxpayers. With the clock ticking, here are five things we found out this year about how HMRC’s digital transformation – including Making Tax Digital – is going.
A year of drift on offshore secrecy
At the very moment the Chancellor was searching for fiscal headroom at last week’s Budget, just across Parliament Square UK ministers and representatives of some of the world’s most important offshore financial centres were presiding over another year of drift and broken promises on tackling offshore secrecy.
“New £2.6bn tax compliance crackdown can’t work if existing tools are barely being used”: TaxWatch Budget analysis
The Budget’s third-largest tax pledge relies on a UK tax authority that is suffering from recruitment delays and unfinished IT systems. Just 26 of 6,700 extra compliance/debt staff promised by Chancellor are so far in post. A key tax to counter digital giants’ profit-shifting will remain despite Trump pressure, but the Budget has missed opportunities to tackle abused corporate reliefs now as large as the child benefit budget.
Staffing delays could threaten Chancellor’s £15 billion tax revenue plans
Though it’s been absent from the pre-Budget debate, the Chancellor’s second-biggest revenue-raising policy so far is a plan to boost HMRC’s personnel & systems: recruiting 6,700 more staff to chase an extra £15.5 billion of evaded tax and tax debts. Yet TaxWatch has found that just 26 of these promised new staff are yet in post, calling into question a key plank of the government’s tax and spend plans.
In the run-up to a make-or-break Budget, TaxWatch’s new State of Tax Administration report takes a deep dive into how HMRC has been running the tax system over the last year.