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Looking back at 2019

Frank Haskew, head of the ICAEW Tax Faculty, reviews 2019, including Brexit, Making Tax Digital, off-payroll working, the contractor loan charge and HMRC’s resource issue.

ReviewTraditionally, the first editorial of the year is a time for looking back over the events of the past year and making a few predictions about what might happen in the year ahead.

Last year I said that looking back is the easy bit, and looking ahead is rather harder. This year, I am not so sure whether looking back is the easy bit, given 2019 has been dogged by uncertainty and political instability culminating in another election on 12 December. Hopefully by the time you read this we may at least have greater certainty about the direction the UK will be going in for 2020. The other thing that struck me from rereading last year’s review is a sense of déjà vu. All of the topics mentioned below we also covered in some detail last year.