Hi,
I have hired an accountant to file annual returns for my LTD (micro-entity) and my personal tax returns, but I am concerned about their professionalism (I will explain my concerns further down the message, after the main post).
It’s been a nightmarish experience so far, so I am considering to stop working with them and do the filing myself, or transfer to a new accountant.
Before parting ways, which materials do you recommend I ask them to give me?
I was thinking about:
- their trial balances
- their working books
- filed tax returns
Also, they allowed me to use their address as the address of my LTD (I am currently living abroad), so I imagine that I better find an alternative before parting ways.
Is there anything else I should be paying attention to?
I’ll try to part ways as amicably as possible, but I barely get any service now that I pay their fees, and I am concerned that once we are no longer working together I’ll have no way to get any information from them. So I would like to have as much material as possible that I could either use to start doing my accounting or to pass onto the next accountant.
In fact, I suspect that although I did catch the most glaring issues with the accountant’s work, I might have missed some, meaning that I might need another accountant to sort them out. Anything that I should consider, in this respect?
Further background:
It’s been only the second annual return that they have filed, but in both cases:
- the tax returns were done last minute and in both cases I had to stay up in the middle of the night to see it through with them.
- there were some concerning errors: amounts put in the wrong boxes of the tax return, completely botched currency conversions leading to inflated amounts (about 50% of error over the correct numbers).
- they forgot to record some bank statements all together (in order to do their work, they asked me to provide just the bank statements and a list of expenses).
When I noticed that my numbers and theirs did not match, I asked to see their workbooks so that I could pinpoint the origin of the problem, and they asked for an additional £100 fee to show me the workbooks.
When I found out about the issues in their number, they asked me to add journals to my bookkeeping to compensate for their botched numbers and to align my books to theirs. When asked for the reasoning behind the journal entries, they were evasive or gave conflicting explanations.
They charge £570 p/y (they are not VAT registered) to do their job. This includes my personal tax return.
The LTD has about 100 transactions per year over a multi currency account and does not pay me a salary (no PAYE needed). No VAT registration. Negligible turnover (under £10,000).
The accountant provides no advice over tax efficiency, nor suggested management of expenses, etc.
They just take the numbers and transpose them into the annual return, usually failing at keeping the numbers intact in the process.
To be fair, for this amount, the only thing I was expecting from them was for the numbers to be correct and the annual returns to be compliant, but I might have set the bar too low.
The personal tax return is used essentially to record a yearly dividend and some minor rent income, and yet the accountant managed to get that wrong, too.
Sorry for the long post.
Any advice is welcome.