HMRC used the data in its Self Assessment system to calculate how much self- employed people would receive as part of the SEISS grant award. However, this was developed in the 1990s and lags behind other countries’ systems. HMRC told us that with better quality data it may have been able to help more people and tailor the level of the grant award more to meet people’s individual circumstances. It accepted that it needed to get better quality data and that it was “definitely moving slower than the best countries around the world in resolving that”.15 HMRC conceded that poor data quality meant it had to do a fair bit of data cleansing before launching the scheme to ensure that the data was accurate. It suggested that if this hadn’t been required, it may have been able to open the scheme a couple of weeks earlier.16 The NAO found that technical issues with the Self-Assessment system also meant that HMRC had to manually enter the trading profits of around 800 self-employed people to prevent them from being excluded.17 HMRC has a programme in place, Making Tax Digital, designed to upgrade its systems and permit users to provide information more frequently using digital services. This should provide HMRC with better quality data going forward. This should have been in place by 2019, but apart from a small pilot project, is not now expected until 2023.18