Protecting Yourself from Phishing Scams

In something of an irony (considering who’s received it), a phishing email beat my spam filter last night and landed in my personal inbox. Purporting to come from HMRC, I apparently have a VAT tax refund waiting for me and need to follow the link to fill out a form to claim it. What excitement for a Thursday evening!

I think that everyone will agree with me that this is really quite a suspicious looking email. However, looking today at the kinds of emails TaxCalc generally receives from HMRC, especially with regard to VAT and VAT MOSS, even official emails from HMRC can appear to be quite generic.

For example, VAT return reminders are addressed to Sir or Madam and VAT MOSS emails to just “VAT MOSS user”. Whilst said emails may quote the name of the company and our VAT number, these can easily be found on our website. 

The email prompted me to think about how we can stay safe with phishing scams.

The Digital Tax Account Explained

Back in the March Budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, announced that the tax return would be replaced by a Digital Tax Account by the end of this parliament. As is often the case with Government policy, such broad statements don’t have any immediate substance to them apart from a few broad concepts.

Over the six months that have followed, HMRC have been beavering away at working out what a Digital Tax Account should look like and how it should work. We have been fortunate to be part of this and have helped to shape this development.

Bit by bit, the picture of how the Digital Tax Account will work has become increasingly more clear and now we can finally begin to explain how some of this will work.

HMRC Publishes Response to Penalties Consultation

Back in February of this year, HMRC kicked off a public consultation on the penalties it issues to taxpayers and the reasons why. It’s highly likely that the UK tax regime will become more automated in the coming years and with it, so too will be the application of penalties.

Computers need rules to apply. But what should the new rules look like?

Curiously, the document showed that HMRC wanted to make itself look more fair in how penalties were determined and applied, rather than the hard-and-fast approach taken today.

TaxCalc Cloud Connect – Our approach to Cloud security

At Accountex in May of this year, we announced a new service for our practice customers called TaxCalc Cloud Connect. We're working on it right now and as its name might suggest, it will enable our software to connect to a database in the Cloud, rather than one found on a local computer or network server.

It’s actually a really big project for us. Unlike most of our releases, it doesn’t just touch on the software (which has been turbocharged to deal with latency caused by the Internet) but has required us to build a lot of supporting infrastructure, not just in physical assets such as servers, but in our website too.

Also, for the first time, we’ll be looking after your firm’s data. With this comes great responsibility and so we have sought to find a security model that provides peace of mind whilst not getting in the way.

Windows XP and Security

We recently made the announcement that we would be withdrawing formal support for Microsoft Windows XP on 1 March 2016.

Unsurprisingly, we received a small amount of correspondence from customers on this. As an operating system that will, by next March, have seen some 15 years of service, a handful found our announcement to be somewhat of a blow. Others, however, were more philosophical and accepting that this was an inevitability, especially since Microsoft themselves retired the operating system in April of last year.

Since then, Microsoft haven’t been providing security or other critical updates. This has had a knock on effect with the number of customers using the operating system and, indeed, we’ve seen a rapid reduction in the number of installations running on Windows XP.

HMRC Opens Up New Possibilities to Make TaxCalc Even Better

As well as carrying out the usual duties you’d expect of a Commercial Director, part of my role at TaxCalc is to engage with various Government bodies and help them to shape various future strategies.

Over the last six months, I’ve been invited to London several times to discuss matters concerning HMRC’s digital tax strategy and all that it entails. We see it as being very important to represent not just ourselves but also the accountancy and taxpaying communities. We use our voice to ensure that proposals don’t just suit HMRC but also our customers and where those customers are accountants, their clients too....