As at 28 August 2026, HMRC confirmed to us in writing that it had run no compliance campaign using AI models using data received under the digital platform reporting rules, because the systems to analyse that data is only about to go live. HMRC has been manually “cross-matching your eBay and Vinted data” so you can expect a deluge of letters going out when they turn on AI.
Why we sent a Freedom of Information request to HMRC
Almost everything written about HMRC and online sellers is written to frighten people. Everyone, including us, though that HMRC had already used AI to analyse the datasets it received from online marketplaces like ebay, Amazon, etsy and vinted. SO we wanted to find out how much they had raised and what we can expect in the future.
On 30 July 2026 we asked HMRC for the figures behind its “one to many” campaign aimed at people suspected of not declaring income from online marketplace sales: how many letters, how many disclosures, how many enquiries, how much money, and whether HMRC had ever assessed whether the campaign worked.
While they said that they could not provide some information, especially as they said they haven’t even tracked how effective the campaign was. But what they did share was scarier.
The full response is published at the foot of this page or by following this link: Freedom of Information Request -HMRC Letters August 2026
Has HMRC started using AI with digital platform reporting data?
No. As at 28 August 2026, it had not.
This is the finding that matters most, and it contradicts most of what has been published on the subject.
Since 1 January 2024, digital platforms Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Vinted and several hundred others have had to report seller data to HMRC each year. The first reports, covering calendar year 2024, were due by 31 January 2025. A second set, covering 2025, was due by 31 January 2026. HMRC now holds data on around four million sellers.
HMRC told us there has been no campaign activity informed by that data. Its stated reason: it is still building the systems that will let it automatically extract and analyse the reports, and until those are finished it would have to extract the data manually, which is not part of its normal operating processes. It described the systems as being in the final stages of development.
So where did the 2024 and 2025 nudge letters come from?
So what they are actually saying is that they have manually analysed this data and sent out letters on a very crude basis. They have focused on sellers who have just not declared ANYTHING. That means they have not cross checked what sellers report on their tax return. So when this new system goes live, it will directly compare what sellers reported and what they have in their AI system. That is going to trigger a lot more HMRC letters and its going to be something of a scale we have not seen before.
The thing that has kept letter volumes in the low thousands is a systems constraint, and HMRC says it is nearly resolved.
How many HMRC nudge letters have been sent to online sellers?
22,125 in total across the four years HMRC holds data for.
HMRC holds nothing on online marketplace one-to-many campaigns before 2022/23, so this is the full life of the campaign.
| 2022/23 | 2023/24 | 2024/25 | 2025/26 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nudge letters issued | 8,783 | 5,676 | 7,514 | 152 |
| Disclosures received | 666 | 2,150 | 544 | 1,232 |
| Compliance interventions opened | 0 | 1,658 | 1,852 | 2,005 |
| Cash collected | £244,630 | £4,601,844 | £8,845,982 | £26,865,677 |
| Future revenue benefit | £0 | £1,208 | £199,181 | £652,596 |
| Revenue loss prevented | £17,333 | £49,439 | £51,931 | £313,339 |
| Four-year total yield | £41,843,160 | |||
HMRC financial years, 1 April to 31 March. HMRC holds no data on online marketplace one-to-many campaigns before 2022/23. HMRC states these rows are not linked to one another: a letter issued in one year may produce a disclosure in a later year.
Source: HMRC response to Freedom of Information request FOI2026/82959, dated 28 August 2026, obtained by Your Ecommerce Accountant. Full response (PDF).
Four-year totals: 22,125 letters, 4,592 disclosures, 5,515 interventions, £41,843,160 total yield.
A caveat HMRC makes itself. These rows are not linked. A letter issued in one year may produce a disclosure two years later, and HMRC told us that matching the two would itself breach the cost limit. You cannot read across a column and calculate a response rate. You can read the direction of travel.
Why have HMRC nudge letters dropped by 98%?
Letters fell from 7,514 in 2024/25 to 152 in 2025/26. Read alongside what HMRC told us about its systems, the most likely explanation is that the letter campaign has been paused while the machinery for the next one is built.
152 is too small to be a strategy. A deliberately narrowed campaign looks like several hundred or a few thousand letters. 152 across a full financial year is a residual, consistent with the tail of the wave that ran to 30 May 2025 crossing the April year-end, and then nothing further.
This is a complete year, not a partial one.HMRC’s 2025/26 financial year ended on 31 March 2026. This response is dated 28 August 2026, five months later, and presents the column alongside three closed years without qualification. Letters issued is a fixed count: a letter sent in a closed year cannot be added afterwards.
So what are the 2,005 interventions? Almost certainly the downstream consequence of the 7,514 letters sent the year before. HMRC described these interventions as relating to non-responders, and enforcement lags the letter that triggers it visible in 2022/23, when 8,783 letters produced no interventions at all in the same year. The £26.9m collected in 2025/26 will largely be those earlier cases settling.
That is the important point for anyone selling online. HMRC has not stopped. It has two full years of platform data covering around four million sellers, and an AI system nearly ready to process it. The 2025/26 enforcement figures show what 7,514 letters produced once they worked through. So they have tested the system manually, produced £41m, they are about to turn on their AI system and they know they are going to recover a lot of tax.
How much has HMRC collected from online marketplace sellers?
£40,558,133 in cash collected, and £41,843,160 including future revenue benefit and revenue loss prevented, across 2022/23 to 2025/26.
Cash collected by year: £244,630, then £4.6m, then £8.8m, then £26.9m. The last figure is three times the one before it, and it arrived in a year when HMRC sent only 152 letters.
That is worth sitting with. The money is not produced by the letters in the same year, it is produced by the enquiries that follow the letters, one to three years later. Which is why £26.9m in a year with almost no letters is the clearest available measure of what the earlier waves are still yielding, and why the figure is a floor rather than a ceiling: cash continues to arrive on cases already open.
What happens if you ignore an HMRC nudge letter?
5,515 compliance interventions have been opened, and HMRC described these as relating to non-responders. It also told us that more than 5,000 relevant tax interventions were opened between 2023/24 and 2025/26 alone.
A nudge letter is not a formal compliance check. It is an invitation to put things right before one starts. Not responding is the most reliable way of converting the first into the second.
Note the shape of the first year: in 2022/23 HMRC sent 8,783 letters and opened no interventions at all. The enforcement tail arrives later than the letters do, which is why “nothing happened last time” is not evidence of anything.
Has HMRC assessed whether the campaign worked?
No. HMRC confirmed it holds no information relating to evaluations of the nudge letter and compliance activity relating to online marketplaces.
No internal evaluation. No post-campaign review. No management information on outcome, yield or return on investment. A campaign that has issued 22,125 letters and recovered £41.8m has not, on HMRC’s own account, been assessed.
It is in the response, at the foot of this page, and anyone is free to draw their own conclusion.
Who is actually receiving these HMRC letters?
The FOI tells you how many letters went out. It does not tell you who got them. We can, because we see them.
In our casework, the HMRC letters we deal with are overwhelmingly Ebay and Amazon Sellers this is a mixture of small businesses, personnel sellers and people clearing out their lofts. In many cases people do not think they need to report to HMRC as they never realised selling on Amazon, vinted or ebay meant you should report taxes.
They will continue to target side hustlers who didn’t report anything. But they will soon start targeting those who may have reported their figures but may have underreported or did not calculate their turnover correctly.
Why compliant online sellers will get letters anyway
This is the part that surprises people. You can be fully declared, fully VAT registered, filed on time every year, and still receive one. Four reasons we see repeatedly:
- Gross receipts versus declared turnover. The platform reports what was paid to the seller. Your accounts reflect that figure after seller fees, FBA charges, refunds, returns, reimbursements and advertising spend. On a business turning over £400k, the gap between the reported number and the declared number can run to six figures and to an automated matching system, a gap is a gap.
- Marketplace-collected VAT. Where Amazon accounts for the VAT, the money flowing through the platform and the money in your VAT returns describe different things. Perfectly correct, and it does not reconcile on its face.
- Account names that don’t match the entity. A great many sellers started as sole traders and incorporated later, with the Amazon account still in a personal name. The platform reports the individual; the income is declared in the company. That is a flag with no wrongdoing behind it at all.
- Multi-currency and multi-marketplace settlement. European marketplace income, currency conversion at settlement, and a calendar-year report against an April tax year. Three separate reasons the numbers won’t line up.
- None of these mean you owe anything. All of them mean you need to be able to explain the difference, in writing, inside about thirty days. The sellers who struggle are not the ones who did something wrong, they are the ones who cannot produce a reconciliation quickly enough.
- If you are an Amazon or multi-channel seller, the useful preparation is a reconciliation, not a defence. Gross platform receipts, bridged line by line to declared turnover, for each year in question. Build it now and a letter is an afternoon’s work. Build it under deadline and it is a fortnight of panic.
Is the 30 sales / £10000 threshold a tax-free allowance?
No, and this is the single most common error in this subject
For sales of goods, a platform is only excused from reporting you if you made fewer than 30 sales and received less than £1000.
The threshold decides whether you appear in a report. It has nothing to do with whether you owe tax. Two examples that show why the two questions must be kept apart:
- Reported, owes nothing. You clear the loft and sell 200 items of your family’s old clothes on Vinted for £900. You are well over the 30-sale limb, so you are reported. You bought none of it to resell and everything sold for less than it cost. Tax due: nil.
- Not reported, may well owe tax. You buy trainers at clearance and flip twelve pairs for £800. Under both limbs, so no report is filed. You are trading, and the £1,000 trading allowance is the only thing standing between you and a filing obligation.
Am I trading, or just selling my own things?
The test is the badges of trade: did you acquire the goods with the intention of selling them at a profit, how frequently do you do it, how organised is the activity, did you modify the goods to make them saleable. One purchase made with intent to resell can be trading. Two hundred sales from your own wardrobe generally is not.
If you are trading, gross income over £1,000 in a tax year takes you outside the trading allowance and into self assessment. Gross, not profit. Sell £6,000 of stock at a £900 profit and you are over.
What should I do now?
Reconcile the calendar year to the tax year. Platforms report 1 January to 31 December. Your return runs 6 April to 5 April. The two will never agree, and a mismatch is precisely what an automated system flags. Being able to explain the gap is worth more than hoping nobody looks.
Get your platform reports for 2024 and 2025. Platforms must give you a copy of what they sent HMRC. Obtaining that calmly is a different job from obtaining it inside a 30-day deadline.
If you have undeclared income, disclose before HMRC contacts you. An unprompted disclosure through the Digital Disclosure Service attracts materially lower penalties than a prompted one. That penalty gap is the largest number in this subject that is still within your control, and a letter closes it permanently, once one arrives, the disclosure is prompted by definition.
If your affairs are straight, do nothing except keep the evidence. Being reported is not an accusation.
What should I do if I receive an HMRC letter?
Do not ignore it. These letters carry a response deadline, typically around 30 days, with a longer window to make a disclosure. Missing it is what moves you into the intervention column of the table above.
Do not panic and overpay. The letter says HMRC has information suggesting undeclared income. It does not say HMRC is right. Plenty of recipients owe nothing, because they were selling personal possessions or have already declared correctly.
You should calculate your own figures or get advice from an accountant. In many cases HMRC will make assessments on gross revenue. That means you pay tax on revenue rather than profit. In one case HMRC said the client owed £50,000 in tax. When we calculated this properly it was only £2000.
Take advice before you reply, not after. The response sets the shape of everything that follows.
Frequently asked questions
Has HMRC used Amazon, eBay, Etsy or Vinted platform data to send letters?
Not as at 28 August 2026. HMRC confirmed under FOI2026/82959 that no campaign activity had been informed by data received under the digital platform reporting rules, because the systems needed to extract and analyse that data were still in development. The earlier letters used HMRC's pre-existing marketplace data.
How many HMRC nudge letters have gone to online sellers?
22,125 between 2022/23 and 2025/26: 8,783, then 5,676, then 7,514, then 152.
How much has HMRC collected from online marketplace compliance activity?
£40,558,133 in cash, and £41,843,160 including future revenue benefit and revenue loss prevented, over the same four years.
How many enquiries has HMRC opened into online sellers?
5,515 compliance interventions across the four years, described by HMRC as relating to non-responders. More than 5,000 of those fell between 2023/24 and 2025/26.
Why has an Amazon seller received an HMRC letter when everything is declared?
Because the figure a platform reports, gross receipts paid to the seller, is not the figure in your accounts, which is net of seller fees, refunds, FBA charges and advertising. Marketplace-collected VAT, platform accounts still held in a personal name after incorporating, and calendar-year reporting against an April tax year all widen the gap. A mismatch is not an allegation, but it does need explaining inside the deadline.
What should an Amazon seller prepare?
A reconciliation from gross platform receipts to declared turnover, year by year, with each adjustment identified. That single document answers most of what a letter asks.
Does the 30 sales / £1,700 threshold mean I don't pay tax?
No. It only determines whether a platform reports you to HMRC. Whether you owe tax is a separate question, decided by whether you are trading and whether your gross trading income exceeds the £1,000 trading allowance. The two numbers are unrelated and are routinely confused.
What happens if I ignore an HMRC nudge letter?
HMRC's own data shows compliance interventions being opened specifically in relation to non-responders. Ignoring the letter is the route to a formal enquiry. Worse, it opens the door to HMRC assessing you on its own estimate, which is typically built on the gross receipts the platform reported rather than your actual profit, with no credit for the costs you incurred. That figure can be many times the tax genuinely due, and the burden then falls on you to displace it.
Is a nudge letter the same as a tax investigation?
No. It is a one-to-many prompt sent to a group of people, not a formal compliance check into you individually. It can become one.
Talk to us
We are e-commerce accountants. Online sellers are what we do, and HMRC correspondence about marketplace income is routine work here.
If you have had an HMRC letter, send it to us before you respond. We will tell you honestly whether you have a problem and, if you do, what the cheapest route through it looks like.
If you have not had a letter but know your affairs are not straight, this is the window. Voluntary disclosure now is a fundamentally different conversation from disclosure after contact.
Send us your HMRC letter Book a free consultation
"I've been working with Ben and the rest of the team for the best part of 10 months, so happy to have engaged him in regards to my HMRC affairs. We are getting through it slowly but surely. Overall a wholesome experience. Thank you YourEcommerce Accountant."
Mike — Trustpilot
Source, and how to cite this
Based on HMRC's response to a Freedom of Information request submitted by Your Ecommerce Accountant on 30 July 2026.
- Reference: FOI2026/82959
- Response date: 28 August 2026
- Issued by: HMRC Information Rights Unit, Newcastle upon Tyne
- Outcome: Refused under section 12(1) FOIA (cost limit); data released outside the FOI on a discretionary basis
Read HMRC's full response (PDF)
We publish the response in full because we would rather people argued with the primary source than with our summary of it.
Citing this data?
You are welcome to reproduce these figures. We ask only that you link back to this page so readers can reach the original response. Suggested wording:
HMRC data released under Freedom of Information request FOI2026/82959, obtained by Your Ecommerce Accountant (August 2026). https://yourecommerceaccountant.co.uk/hmrc-letters-online-sellers/
Journalists: contact press@yourecommerceaccountant.co.uk. We will supply the original PDF and comment on request.
Written by Ben Sztejka, chartered accountant and Managing Director of Your Ecommerce Accountant. General information, not advice on your specific circumstances. We will update this page when HMRC's platform data systems go live; a follow-up Freedom of Information request is scheduled.
