Look at the tax calendar for the first week of August and you will see something HMRC would rather you didn't notice.

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On Tuesday 4 August, a government consultation quietly closes. On Friday 7 August, more than 860,000 sole traders and landlords must file their first Making Tax Digital quarterly update. The deadline made the news. The consultation did not. It should have, because the consultation is the point of the deadline.

For years, HMRC assured the self-employed that Making Tax Digital was about reporting, not payment. Keep digital records, send us a summary four times a year, and nothing changes about when you pay. Strictly, that is still true today. But the consultation closing on Tuesday - Timely Payments in Income Tax Self Assessment - proposes that from April 2029, around 2.1 million people with employment income alongside their self-employment will have tax on their trading profits deducted from their payslips, and it 'explores' whether everyone else should pay monthly or quarterly instead of twice a year. Note the order of events: the April 2029 start date was announced at the Budget, months before anyone was asked. Then, in its third question, the consultation asks whether MTD quarterly updates should be used to forecast how much to take. There it is. The quarterly reporting system was the plumbing. Accelerated payment is what runs through it. And a consultation that opens after the decision is not a consultation; it is a courtesy.

Follow the money and the purpose becomes clearer still. The government's own Budget scorecard shows the measure raising an extra 605 million pounds in 2029-30, then fading to a fraction of that. No new tax is being charged - ministers are at pains to say so. It is the same tax, collected earlier, once. That is not modernisation. That is a one-off working-capital transfer from the bank accounts of........

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