News.

After much huffin' & puffin' a new release of the site was completed today. Finally added code to handle VAT number lookups after VIES was withdrawn due to Brexit and also added more code for Fraud Prevention headers
From an end user point of view nothing much has changed though there is a link from the upload page to take you to HMRC's payment gateway.

HMRC have altered the the Fraud Prevention specification. This release is to (hopefully) better align mtdvatbridge.uk with the requirements of the fraud prevention specification.

This is likely to change - some issues have been raised with HMRC and awaiting their response.

Also fixed a minor bug in the login process - it gave a misleading error message. Also added a bit of javascript to get the timezone of the browser - another HMRC Fraud Prevention requirementimposition.

Received from HMRC Tuesday 22nd July 2020.

Today, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury has confirmed that Making Tax Digital (MTD) for VAT will be extended to all VAT registered businesses with turnover below the VAT threshold (£85,000) from April 2022, and from April 2023 to taxpayers who file Income Tax Self-Assessment returns for business or property income over £10,000 annually.

Link to Official Written Statement

HMRC have sent a report out saying that the fraud headers that are returned by mtdvatbridge.uk are not compliant. HMRC have been informed by us that they are. Emails have been sent to the support team asking them to update our profile with the explanations and reasons why our headers are as they are (the headers are not available because we are not an app and not and web app that is installed on end user's machine), as yet we have had no reply. We will continue to push HMRC until their issue is resolved.

Some spam has been coming in via the contact form. Pretty sure it's human rather than bot generated but extra logging has been added to the form just to make the checking simpler.

New version of the return uploaded to solve some minor formatting issues.

The server software has been upgraded to the latest version. mtdvatbridge libraries remain the same.

Bumped up the release to 1.1 to include :

    Modified the sample spreadsheets to reflect box 5 being the absolute
    difference between box 3 and box 4.
    Modified vat100.html and VAT_Return to use absolute value of box 5.
    Modified return success page to take into account paymentindicator field and
    tell user they are expecting a credit or a debit from HMRC.
    Added Audit class and associated database tables and calls from classes.
    Added required extra (empty) fraud prevention headers.

Released a new version of the site to include better reporting and display of selected VAT account.

Today we released a new version of the site.
The main change was to enable the code to allow users who have more than one VAT account manage those VAT accounts from one login. Check out 'Add Another VAT Account' from the 'Account' menu.
There were a couple of minor bugfixes to do with display formatting.

Some new code, configuration and document pages were uploaded to the server today. Any problems, please feel free to hit the contact form or telephone.

We received the following from HMRC. We are not aware of any issues affecting our customers but if you have a letter you may need to check.

We have been advised that some 'VAT notice of assessment of tax' letters recently sent to Making Tax Digital customers, were issued in error.
If the business has already submitted the VAT return in question and paid the tax due/received its repayment, they can ignore this letter. Customers can check their position using 'HMRC online services', and agents can check this on their clients' behalf by using the 'Manage your client's details' service.
Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. The live service issues page will be updated to include this information.

API changes expected and planned for in the event of Brexit on 31st October 2019 have been delayed. We are still awaiting confirmation of the changes that we will need to make in the event of any form of Brexit. When we know what is happening we will update this news channel.

Today we got this:-
"We have temporarily re-enabled support for TLS version 1.0 and 1.1 in our Developer Sandbox due to unexpected network behaviour"
from HMRC. It won't affect running of the site.

Some sample spreadsheets to the 'How To Use Menu' . It may be easier to look at those than make sense of the other documentation.
Jump directly to the Sample Page

"Further to our mail dated 2/10/19 we are pleased to confirm that support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 has been withdrawn from our Developer Sandbox at https://test-api.service.hmrc.gov.uk . All submissions to the Sandbox must now use TLS 1.2 or higher.".
mtdvatbridge.uk is compatible with the change and continues to work.
HMRC will provide details of the date this change will be made to the live service in the near future.

HMRC sent details of new API how to check a VAT number. This is new code - currently HMRC DO NOT provide the means to check a VAT number. mtdvatbridge.uk uses VIES which is a European system. Better late than never .... More coding coming up :-(

The site was down for maintenance 21:00-21:30 on 10th October - so we increase database space.

HMRC Released a memo to MTD VAT developers explaining that in the event of a no deal Brexit there will have to be changes to the API and the VAT100 forms. It seems as if we have a moving target... News will be updated as more details become available.

HMRC's MTD VAT API will be offline 00:00 to 08:00 on Sunday 13th October 2019. Users will not be able to upload VAT returns or query liabilities etc. This is an HMRC issue and affects all HMRC users not just mtdvatbridge.uk.

Added code to timeout idle sessions, cleaned up some untidy modules and modified some modules to use HMRC API calls rather than cached data.

HMRC have restored the MTD VAT API Service. mtdvatbridge.uk should all be working fine now.

The 'organisations/vat' API is currently unavailable. This is an error with HMRC's systems and beyopnd our control. We have received a communication saying the problem is being investigated but as yet we have no indication of when a fix will be in place.

HMRC validated the system and gave the go ahead to use the live API.

The system is currently undergoing a release process to the public facing servers.