Commenting on the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s announcement regarding funding for sole-traders and self-employed people, Sam O’Connor, CEO, Coconut said:
“We commend the Chancellor for providing a generous package of funding support for self-employed people. However, there are millions who cannot wait until June to receive support. They are struggling today to pay bills, mortgages and buy food.
Also, by only using 3 years of self-assessments up to 5th April 2019 to calculate the relief, many of the five million self-employed people, will be penalised by the government as they may only have partial historical earnings to use and will therefore not receive appropriate support.
Despite the government saying that there is nothing it can do for those who have been self-employed for one year or less, we urge the government to allow self-employed people to submit their 2019/2020 Self-Assessment in 10 days on the 6th April and use this up to date data for support.
To prove that this can be done easily, we are launching a free-to-use web tool on 6 April, built on our existing accounting and tax technology. Users will be able to connect their existing bank account from 20 major UK banks and within minutes, 24 months of up to date transaction data will be analysed and categorised for tax giving a clear and simple overview of total income and total allowable expenses, ready to submit to gov.uk.
The tool will cut the time it takes to create a self-assessment by up to 80% and ease the burden on the millions of people who find that they suddenly need to submit their Self-Assessment early before they can access government support.”
