New data reveals that while 86% of tax professionals are aware of the upcoming EU VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA) regulations, a mere 22% have an actionable transition plan. For UK firms already dealing with the fallout of domestic e-invoicing targets, relying on month-end manual scrambles is fast becoming a liability.
There is a dangerous disconnect quietly brewing in the corporate tax sector. While the vast majority of tax and finance professionals know exactly what VAT in the Digital Age (ViDA) is, only a fraction are actually prepared for it.
According to the 2026 ViDA Readiness Report published by the Thomson Reuters Institute, 86% of practitioners state they are familiar with the upcoming regulations. Yet, a mere 22% have a formal transition programme in place. More concerning still, 54% admit they completely lack the resources required to implement compliance.
ViDA isn’t just an EU issue. It is a live operational risk for UK accountants right now.
The data highlights a significant “confidence gap” within finance teams, a tendency to mistake awareness of a deadline for the operational capability to meet it.
| Metric | Status |
|---|---|
| Familiarity with ViDA | 86% |
| Formal Transition Plan in Place | 22% |
| Lack Resources for Compliance | 54% |
UK businesses are facing what experts call a “double exposure.” Not only do they report weaker operational readiness than their EU counterparts across team training and e-invoicing capabilities, but they are also staring down the UK’s own domestic e-invoicing mandate, scheduled for April 2029.
“UK businesses face a compounding challenge that our research makes hard to ignore,” says Hertz Casseus, Senior Regulatory Associate at Thomson Reuters. “Compared to EU counterparts, UK organisations report weaker readiness on nearly every operational measure, team training, real-time invoice extraction, e-invoicing capabilities. And while the 2030 EU deadline gets most of the attention, the more immediate pressure is the UK’s own domestic e-invoicing mandate arriving in April 2029.”
Casseus adds a stark warning regarding the mindset shift required: “What’s most concerning is the confidence gap: organisations that haven’t yet started formal planning are still overwhelmingly confident they’ll be ready on time. That confidence tends to erode fast once they see what compliance actually requires.”
For decades, indirect tax compliance has relied on a predictable rhythm: transactions happen, data is gathered, and the tax team spends the first week of the following month wrangling spreadsheets to fix errors before submission.
ViDA, alongside localized digital reporting requirements across Europe, fundamentally dismantles this model. Because member states are rolling out independent mandates ahead of the EU-wide deadlines, compliance is shifting from retrospective reporting to real-time, transactional validation.
Firms managing clients with EU footprints can no longer rely on manual legacy systems to bridge the gap between disparate ERPs and local tax authorities. The sheer volume of live data pipelines makes the traditional system-by-system approach entirely unscalable.
“For UK accountants managing clients with EU operations, ViDA isn’t a future problem, it’s arriving in waves as member states roll out individual mandates now,” notes Ray Grove, Head of Product, Corporate Tax and Trade at Thomson Reuters. “The challenge we kept hearing from finance and tax teams is that the manual, system-by-system approach that got them through the last decade simply cannot scale to real-time, multi-jurisdiction reporting.”
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To bridge the 54% resource deficit identified in the report, the industry is seeing a rapid shift toward automation and agentic AI tools designed to handle data ingestion and validation without human intervention. The goal is to move the practitioner out of the data-cleansing loop entirely, transforming their role from data processor to strategic defender of the tax return.
Coinciding with the report, Thomson Reuters launched ONESOURCE Indirect Compliance, an AI-driven solution designed to ingest data from disparate financial systems and isolate anomalies before deadlines hit. It represents a broader market trend: the transition to “touchless” compliance.
As Grove points out, the objective of introducing AI into this workflow isn’t just speed it’s auditability:
“The goal is touchless compliance that practitioners can actually defend.”
With 2029 and 2030 deadlines approaching, UK accounting firms and corporate tax departments need to dismantle the assumption that they have time on their side.
Audit the Tech Stack Now: Assess whether current systems can handle real-time API data transfers or if they are overly reliant on manual batch uploads.
Map EU Exposure: Review clients or internal business units operating in EU member states to identify which local mandates (e.g., Poland, Italy, France) impact the supply chain first.
Address the Resource Deficit: If more than half the industry lacks the internal bandwidth to deploy these compliance frameworks, firms must look to automated indirect tax solutions early to avoid a bottleneck closer to the regulatory horizons.
