Incorrect advice from accountant - WWYD?

[Snog]

Looking for opinions here on what to do next.

I paid for a specialist accountant to calculate my tax on a capital gain.
They advised me of the tax due and asked my to approve the amount so they could upload it to HMRC website.

No calculation was supplied to me just the total tax I owed.

I queried it as it was more than I was expecting and the accountant said sorry she had forgotten to update one of the figures and the correct amount was £1,700 less than she originally said.

I nearly said ok to the original figure as I figured she was a professional and knew what she was doing. I have now asked to see the detailed calculation and it looks right to me.

Given that I nearly paid £1700 in tax that wasn't due to to her mistake would I be reasonable in asking for a discount on the fee (which they made me pay upfront)?

You can’t compare it to amputating the wrong leg 🙄

the accountant is human, there was a human error in a complex calculation which was spotted (by you but would have been spotted by them before submission). No loss suffered.

Accept everyone is human and move on. Would you like it if you made a mistake that you then sorted immediately and then someone wanted to complain and go to your boss / regulator / write negative reviews online??

@22Newnames why do you think it would have been spotted anyway before submission by my accountant?

Because there is always a final review process before submission.

I know you don't have legal recourse, OP, but you've instructed a qualified professional to do this task for you to be 100% certain it's correct, and to save your time in doing it yourself.

You haven't had the convenient, quality service you paid for.

I can see why a goodwill gesture would be appropriate and I can see why you're cross you spent a fair amount of money and still have had to take on work yourself.

I work in tax and I agree that you have had shoddy service. Regardless of the error, it is extremely poor form to simply ask an individual to approve a submission without having them see the supporting calculation. An individual is generally not going to know the mechanics behind the tax due, however they can review a calculation to see if the fundamental figures used are correct. I imagine there may have been a transposition error when doing the calculation, which caused the increase in tax.

Unfortunately though, unless they give you a fee reduction as a gesture of goodwill, I wouldn't automatically see that you will get one. The end result is that the correct figures were submitted (albeit with a nudge) so there is no actual loss to you. If they had been submitted and you uncovered the error after you had paid, I would expect them to correct the error free of charge and perhaps give a goodwill gesture fee reduction to account for lost out interest on the additional money paid.

It may be one of those pay the fee and not use them again situations which is frustrating, but there isn't much you can do really. I would doubt the accountancy body (assuming they are acting under ACA or ACCA) would do much more than a rap on the wrist if they investigated if you contacted them.

Obviously proceed with your complaint to the national form, but don't fix your sights on getting a fee reduction. If they are stonewalling you, sometimes it's better to value your time and efforts as more than continuing a complaint. By all means submit a review however, as it is your real life experience of the firm.

i missed that

in any event, it did not.

you are ultimately responsible for checking what is submitted.

you fulfilled your responsibility and checked. Identified an error and it was remedied so you suffered no loss

ifyou want to pursue and have lots of spare time on our hands - go for it. You will get no where though

How can you categorically say that?

There are procedures in all kinds of businesse but no guarantee that they will always be followed. Idividuals stuff up in their jobs every day despite there being rules in place

We have no idea if it's true that the accoutant would have caught the mistake. I'm quite surprised at how many posters would shrug this off

Good luck with getting a refund OP

The unprofessional thing is sending the number to pay without any back up, and I assume once you saw the break down you spotted an input error and it was fixed.

As you should never agree to numbers being submitted before seeing how the numbers were calculated it would have been picked up pre-submission.

Can't see any discount is due. The work was done, a draft reviewed and corrected, correct numbers submitted.

@AllThatFancyPaintsAsFair

It is not a question of “shrugging things off”

It is an understanding of what constitutes professional negligence. And this doesn’t even come close.

Maybe they’ll ‘almost’ offer you a discount on their fees?
I'm not so sure that it would have resulted in a ‘permanent loss’. www.mercianaccountants.co.uk/how-to-reclaim-overpaid-capital-gains-tax-on-residential-property/
there’s a lot of info out there on how to reclaim overpaid CGT.

@Soontobe60 of course you can claim overpaid CGT if you know it's been overpaid. In this case nobody would know, as I have already said, as nobody would have any cause to suspect the tax paid was not the tax owed.

Maybe it's because I haven't got the hang of the new format @falloutcheer but I haven't seen that the OP is suggesting negligence, she seems to be askng for a reduction in cost for a sub standard service which imo is a perfectly reasonable request

Years ago I worked in a different type of professional firm and reductions bills were given in these circumstances so it doesn't seem so odd to me to ask. What's the downside other than as a PP said your own time and stress? The OP isn't going to work with them again.

Your understanding is correct, my opinion is that it's poor practice rather than negligence and I was looking for an acknowledgment (by way of discount on fees) that the service did not meet expected standards on this occasion and has caused me time and anxiety as a result. The acknowledgment was made but discount refused.

Oh in that case, absolutely ask.

forward on the exchange where concedes the error and simply say

”in view of the below exchange, I would expect a reduction. The potential financial loss that I would have incurred had I not noticed the error would have been substantial”

Thanks to all posters for very useful advice and range of opinions.

Fwiw it’s a shitty organisation.

That means that you are paying someone to do a job you cannot do and have no qualification for but you are supposed to accept that their errors/mistakes/whatever is your responsibility….
Now I get it. It’s removing the issue in the HMRC eyes of people giving partial information to their accountant (knowingly) and then saying they are innocent and it’s their accountant fault.

However, Where is the part where you are asking for a professional advice and paid for that? Accountants should be help responsible when they give unsuitable advice, just like financial advisors or any other professional really.
(I’m thinking there about advice from an accountant who told my MIL not to bother with paying taxes as her income was so low. She is now a widow wo a full state pension….)

I was an accountant for a firm like this in a previous life, and now I would be more likely to be the client.

Mistakes do happen, so I’d be annoyed about that part, but be grateful you did query it (because a lot of clients just blindly sign and don’t check) and the error was fixed.

I do think as a gesture of goodwill they could reduce the fee due to your complaint, however they are under no legal or probably even moral requirement to do so. They’ve done the work, corrected the error and they should be paid for it. They most likely (rightly so) won’t have charged you for the additional time fixing their mistake.

I work a lot with builders and we often have to get them back to repair things that should’ve been right first time. We don’t pay usually for the additional time, but we don’t get a discount on the original work

I’m a Chartered Accountant.

We see a client relationships as long term business partners. If a client requested a discount over an issue like this we’d grant it but then drop them as a client going forward, so make sure you can source another Accountant before you ask.

£600 is not a lot. Everyone makes mistakes and it caused you no loss. Move on and let it go.

Very curious to see what you would have said to a client when you have made an obvious mistake (and potentially quite an expensive one too).

im in a very different area of work. I have a partnership with my clients. But because I have a partnership that sort of issue doesn’t happen in that way.
I would have profusely apologised first and foremost.
I would have asked if they needed anything else.
Basically I’d have looked after them well. Because that’s what a partnership is.
The other side of the coin is that, when I make mistakes (which all of us do, you, me and the OP’s accountant), it rarely comes to that. If it does, then I have failed to establish the partnership.

Fwiw I also use an accountant. I don’t have a partnership with them. Just like the OP, they receive numbers form me once a year by email. They send me the amount I need to pay and out the numbers through.
Thats not a partnership such as the one you have with people when you do their account every year, advise them on what to do, on their business etc… It’s buying a product/service once a year. That’s it. Because I have no other business relationship with them. Very different (I hope!) with what you are describing when you talk about partnership.

I suppsoe we also do not know how the error occurred

if they typed in say £100,000 as sale proceeds rather than £10,000 thats one thing.

But if there was a train of correspondence and it was mentioned "we got £120k for the item" but actually that £120k was after selling costs and actually the sales figure was £140k, then its an different type of error, a misunderstanding on what a figure given represented.

But thats why you'd always ask to see the back up to how the gain was calculated -which immediately it was received showed an obvious error.

As you would never have agreed the figure without seeing the calculation, the wrong figure never would have been submitted surely?

The accountant asked me to agree the final tax figure but didn't supply the calculation. She expected me to agree the final figure without seeing the calculation.

When I queried it I asked to see the backing calculation and she said oh I see now I have made an error by not updating one of the figures, the correct tax amount for you to pay is now X, do you still want to see the calculation?
So even the second time she gave me a final figure for approval she didn't supply the calculation in the first instance.

I am therefore not 100% certain what the initial error was but I think she probably put in the value at acquisition as zero. The calculation wasn't an especially complicated one in the end and didn't have many figures to include.

@burnoutbabe "As you would never have agreed the figure without seeing the calculation, the wrong figure never would have been submitted surely? "

I have never used an accountant before. She expected me to approve the final figure without seeing the calculation so I assumed that was usual practice and hence I almost didn't query it.

Complete contradiction

I'm not sure why it would be difficult to source another accountant anyway, lots of other firms had quoted for the work and I hadn't gone with the cheapest.

Solicitors seem to be overrun with work at the moment but not so accountants.