Advice for clients thinking of registering for VAT
From 1 August 2022, all new VAT registrations will be signed up for Making Tax Digital automatically. This means there is no need to register clients separately for Making Tax Digital for VAT. The recently released Agent Update 98 has highlighted the following information from HMRC about upcoming changes to VAT registration:
HMRC has been developing a new VAT Registration Service (VRS) which will speed up the process and improve our security. We have been testing the service throughout the past 18 months and have now had over 37,000 customers successfully register their own business.
The next step is to switch on the new functionality for Agents, at which time we will divert all new applications from the legacy service. One of the key changes is that every customer will be automatically signed up to Making Tax Digital as part of registration, removing the need for that extra step.
The service will go live on 1 August 2022. We recommend that if you have incomplete, unsubmitted VAT applications for your customers, these are submitted by 31 July 2022 at 5pm. Any partially completed, saved applications on the old service will be lost after this time. You will however have the same functionality in the new service to save applications for up to 4 weeks before submitting them.
Any further details surrounding the new service will be published in future Agent Updates.
From 1 April 2022 MTD for VAT became mandatory for all VAT-registered businesses for VAT return period starting after 1 April 2022. Existing VAT-registered businesses should be unaffected by this change.