Making Tax Digital, Free and Open
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15 users here now
This is a place for discussing the UK government's Making Tax Digital (MTD) initiative. In particular how we as a community can continue to file our taxes freely in terms of both:
- Avoiding high fees and vendor lock-in to commercial software
- Maintaining user freedoms with free and open source software
Our banner is in the public domain and titled "G. Reisch, Margarita philosophica" from the Wellcome Collection (source) It's a medieval illustration showing a woman sitting at a counting table and a man at another table using an abacus.
founded 20 hours ago
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Welcome! The idea for this community came from a Mastodon post:
https://floss.social/@IanTwenty/114868391122043853
...and the forthcoming changes to how UK individuals and business will have to file their taxes, i.e. Making Tax Digital (MTD).
For some these changes may mean they are compelled to subscribe to a commercial software package and/or change their ways of working considerably. For some small businesses the cost of accounting software and services may be their largest expense.
My fear is that the MTD changes mean there can never be a free and open source alternative to managing personal and business finances in the UK. I hope I'm wrong.
Through this community it would be great to share and discuss:
- The changes that are coming in the UK government's Making Tax Digital initiative, both for individuals and businesses.
- How to keep filing taxes without having to subscribe to expensive accounting software.
- How to maintain our freedom when filing and paying taxes - freedom over what software you run and what it does with your personal/company data.
- I am very interested in the possibility of starting a free/open source project that could be compliant with the MTD requirements that we all might use - OR discovering and supporting such a project if it already exists.
- Lessons from other countries that have been/are going through a similar transition. I understand parts of MTD may be addressing an EU-wide effort to address fraud.
We are hosted on feddit.uk, a UK-centric Lemmy instance so thanks to them for having us. They have a code of conduct, please abide by that (see What are the rules here? in their homepage sidebar).
Image is "Rest & Welcome", Dorchester by National Brewery Heritage Trust - National Brewery Heritage Trust, United Kingdom - CC BY-SA (source)
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