Posts by fitzpat 25 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2018
Great customer service getting me up and running, all problems were due to Openreach and BT not releasing the line on the right day.
Solid speed as far as I have seen.
The only downside was I couldn't get the phone app to talk to the supplied router to set it up, but I was always going to use my own anyway.
Ain't no laws or regulations about social distancing, your one-a-day exercise, or buying luxury food items instead of beans and potatos.
The point is Plod routinely interprets CMO advice and ministerial requests as The Law, and get really, really pissed off when you present the actual law to them. And the curtain-twitchers doing the same - mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
There's two parts to any 3g/4g/5g mobile network, the radio side, and the core side.
It's mostly backwards compatible, so this NSA 5G means the radio side is genuinely using 5G frequencies, but connecting to the 4G core. I can't comment if the mooted low latency characteristic of 5g is affected.
I worked directly in the MTD team defining/implementing the API - against the HMRC Policy Team's requirements. They really are incapable of thinking about data, only about the paper form with 9 boxes. We did our best to protect you/us all from them and the 1000 year old organisation around them.
Re: spreadsheets - absolutely acceptable, but there must be an automated i.e. code process that sends data to the API. No copy paste into handcrafted JSON and scripted REST requests, sorry.
What must be sent via API every 3 months is pretty much what you enter on the website now, but only for that 3 months, and to be sent within 1 month of the end of that period else PENALTIES.
You need to maintain but do not have to provide the raw transactions i.e. the spready unless they ask, for example in an investigation.
In the case of VAT, completely trucking pointless with such a low error/compliance rate in the existing web submission system. But it will prep people nicely for the real prize - MTD for self assessment income tax . Yep you're going to have to do your income tax return every 3 months too.
Why would a Project Manager be deciding what gets delivered? They have no place in an Agile delivery organisation. Only the Product Owner can make that call.
Project Managers are only sprinkled in (or in the case of DWP/HMRC/etc, doled in with ladles) to give the illusion of waterfall control when in actuality they're just reporting monkeys.
........ yet again Agile as a software methodology being confused/conflated with public sector political ineptitude.
The HMRC online estate is OK - meaning the current online SA and VAT returns, but the problem with MTD is HMRC are expressly *not* providing any means of a consumer interface - not even a reference implementation for software vendors/accountants to understand how it might be made to work in the real world. It's really just a set of APIs pushing data into HMRC. And for that reason, the transformation they are looking for from a paper world to a online digital world is miles away. They're 2 years in and haven't agreed on the user journeys.
You're still going to have to submit your VAT every 3 months, but now you're going to have to provide every line item to prove the numbers.
Same goes for self-employed / sole traders - record every item of income and expenditure into some "digital" form, and submit the summarised details every 3 months via the API - no website! - AND THEN at the end of the year submit it all again AND THEN swear on your firstborns soul that you've made no mistakes. Apparently somebody somewhere will provide this service for free - because that's HMRC policy, and so it shall happen.
The burden is massive and disproportionately affects the by-the-rules small fry, and goes nowhere to catch the rogues.
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