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HMRC published its 2025 to 2026 "Tell ABAB" report today, at a useful point in the autumn planning cycle.
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HMRC published its 2025 to 2026 “Tell ABAB” report today, at a useful point in the autumn planning cycle. Published on 15 September 2026, it arrives as accountants and owner-managers start lining up year-end tax and filing work. HMRC says it is “a report summarising the responses to an annual online survey”. It adds that the exercise “aims to improve HMRC’s service to small businesses” in the GOV.UK publication. For trade creditors, that matters because administrative drag often reaches payment timing before it reaches formal distress.
HMRC has issued a new corporate report from the Administrative Burdens Advisory Board. Its formal title is “Administrative Burdens Advisory Board ‘Tell ABAB’ report 2025 to 2026”. The immediate value is timing. A fresh HMRC-backed view of small-business friction is most useful before autumn work queues harden.
This is not a new penalty, threshold or filing rule. It is an official read on what small businesses are telling HMRC through its annual online survey. That makes it a practical planning document for advisers, finance teams and SME owners tracking where routine administration still slows trading.
On the evidence published today, the pressure looks broad rather than concentrated. HMRC presents this as a small-business service issue, not a sector-specific one, so routine compliance friction can surface across ordinary SME books. Broad signals matter differently from concentrated ones. They raise portfolio-wide execution risk, even when no single sector is clearly under strain.
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For UK creditors, this is a planning prompt, not a panic signal. When administration absorbs management time, invoices get queried later, supporting papers arrive slower, and payment promises become more conditional. That is exactly the sort of soft deterioration that can sit upstream of harder cash stress.
The first question is simple: which customers already struggle with routine requests? Accountants should use today’s publication to tighten autumn tax and filing calendars for smaller clients. Credit teams should refresh onboarding packs, named contacts and chase routines now, while issues are still administrative rather than acute. Broad pressure needs steady portfolio discipline, not a narrow sector blocklist.
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