Can anyone reccomend an ACCOUNTANT who is a WHIZZ at US TAXES in London?

[PutThatInYourPipeandSmokeIt]

DH is american and we're both in the UK so need an accountant who can deal proficiently with UK and US taxes as well as someone who can do tax planning....

Talk to one of the big accountancy firms - they all have US tax desks in their UK operations.

I'd be interested if you find anyone good

The last lot we used were not great

We don't want to use a big firm as they are very expensive and have cost us money by not doing the job properly. We would prefer the better care by a smaller company.

Who did you use TheBlonde? Ours was E&Y....

We used a smaller firm initials BL

They were not cheap and made errors that cost us £.

Not sure but he may want to leave before the 6th April to avoid paying the new £30k tax thing... time is ruining out and the Government is making a huge mess of it and the US and UK are blaming each other over the risk US citizens will be taxed twice on non UK income.

If you want a smaller firm, then I would talk to Grant Thornton or Smith & Williamson.

Xenia talk to me immediately - what 30k thing?? We live here in the UK, so there will be none of him leaving!

Gordon Brown has decided to drive most non-domiciled wealthy businessmen and women away from the UK so the country becomes much worse off and raises less tax. At the moment if you are not domiciled here for tax purposes - say US citizen in the UK you pay UK tax on your UK income (so far so good) - that remains. Some people have income from abroad including relatively poor paid academics - 1 in 5 UK university lecturers I think will be hit by the new taxes as well as many other groups.

If you have no income from abroad though it's not an issue at all (and all those Poles in London for example will have none so it's not a problem. If you do have income abroad - e.g. Philip Green although 98^% of his company's share are owned by his wife who is domiciled in Monaco I suppose... if you do then for the first time form the new tax year 2008 you will be taxed on the US (and other foreign income here or - you get the choice - or you can pay £30k. So if say you have £100m foreign earnings - Abramovitch type people you pay the £30k., But even there they are reluctant because clearly it's a thin end of the wedge - they get details of your foreign income (or pay thieves to steal the data as the UK tax office and German one has been doing recently) and later increase the tax beyond £30k.

The particular US problem is that you may also be taxed in the US On the US income (eg on US income from savings or property rent) and because of some problem with the UK/US double tax treaty at the moment it looks like that would be taxed twice.

Even more fun this is being rushed in which may be in breach of EU law on human rights because it does not give people proper time to reorganise their affairs and may be a bit back dated in various ways.

Anyway it won't affect a US person working here unless they have income arising outside of the UK so that may be your husband. Before April though it's wise to take some tax advice and there may be ways to give foreign income away (as long as there's no reserved benefit to it). I am not a tax lawyer though so I'm not the best person to consult on this.

I do our US taxes using Turbotax. It's pretty straightforward.

Even if you have an accountant do your taxes, it is still a huge amount of work getting the information to them. Their forms can be longer than the 1040!

The main issue with the 30K fee is that is it not a tax as far as the US is concerned so you can't deduct it against your US taxes

Really badly thought through in all sorts of ways.

It sounds like the OP is ordinarily resident and domiciled in the UK, so any news about new UK tax laws for non-doms are a bit of a red herring.

PutThat, if you are interested in doing the taxes yourself, I am happy to give you some pointers.