USING TECHNOLOGY, BEING PROMPT
Recently tax returns have been in the news with leading politicians feeling the pressure to publish their returns. What did we learn? The Tory politicians had other sources of income and the leader of the Labour party completed his return by hand, forgot to include his pension income and was fined £100 for filing his return late.
There really is no excuse for filing tax returns late. The tax year finishes on 5 April and we have until the following 31 January to file our tax return and pay the tax. That is nearly 10 months. This year our first client’s 2015/16 tax return was filed on 15 April and the second one was filed on 20 April.
That does not mean we can avoid filing tax returns right up to the deadline on 31 January 2017. We do our best to keep our clients on the straight and narrow and if a tax return is filed late we know that it is not due to our incompetence but due to our client not providing us with the information we need. However, we know of some accountants who are routinely disorganised and frequently file their clients’ tax returns late. If you have had experience of that and it wasn’t your fault then you really should move advisers. Contact us to see how we can look after you properly.
We also use technology to speed up the whole process. Politicians have to file a hard copy of their tax returns but most other people file online. 100% of our clients had their 2013/14 tax returns filed online and every year since has been the same. Once the tax return has been completed we put it in a secure part of the cloud, our client approves it and we then file it. This whole process can take minutes and not a single stamp will have been used!
If you like our approach – the use of technology and being prompt – then we would like to have a chat with you to see how we can take away the worry of tax returns so you can focus on something more productive.
