Digital artisans question tone of HMRC's latest mega deal

Worried digital artisans, fretting about the implications of Make Tax Digital, were less than impressed with HMRC's mega deal with British data/AI outfit Quantexa announced today.

London-based Quantexa is the beneficiary of a £175m, ten-year partnership, designed to overhaul the HMRC data infrastructure.

The tax authority is in a scrap to recover billions lost to evasion and sophisticated fraud.

The deal aims to fix the “fragmented” legacy systems that have dogged HMRC’s ability to track the UK’s tax gap.

It's said that tax evasion is running at around £5.5bn, with a further £47bn in taxes going unpaid last year.

What´s more, it´s estimated that HMRC paid out nearly £1m in fraud tip-offs last year, up 92 per cent.

What dismayed digital artisans, who contacted us on hearing of the multi-million pound deal, was that the emphasis was on tax evasion and fraud, and not ensuring that HMRC could cope with running a tax system which put the customer/user first, making it more efficient.

HMRC received 93,589 formal complaints from taxpayers in the 2024/25 tax year (April 2024 to March 2025), marking a five-year high.

What's more, compensation pay-outs rose 35% to £1.17 million (average £125 per upheld complaint), driven by service failures like long waits.

One digital artisan who contacted us, and wished to remain anonymous, said: "Yeah, great that they are cracking down on fraud and all that, but what about us tax payers?

The system is cumbersome and slow. It doesn't work if you have a problem. It's hard to speak to someone, and the delays in getting your problem sorted are stupidly long.

"And now they've introduced Make Tax Digital, which makes things worse. I am very disappointed that they are not solving the fundamental issues first."

Some also voiced concerns of another Post Office Horizon IT scandal. This involved the wrongful prosecution of over 900 innocent subpostmasters. They were falsely accused of theft and false accounting, undone by fabricated financial shortfalls caused by the Fujitsu-developed Horizon accounting software.

Another digital artisan told us: "My nightmare is that if AI gets involved, we'll get an even worse deal, because decisions will be taken that could be wrong, or unjust, by a bot, and there'll be no human to talk to and sort it out. It could be a bad day for us tax payers."

GetBertie will keep a close watch on the developing situation.

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