Prevention is better than cure!

You may have noticed (as we have) that the Inland Revenue have identified that they can secure some very useful additional cash from charging penalties for every misdemeanour. A day late with your tax return? £100 penalty please. Forget to send in your staff's P35 (end of year PAYE summary)? £100 penalty. Partnership Return late? £100 for each partner in the practice! - that's £600 for a 6 partner practice.

Tax Compliance

Our personal tax compliance service, managed by Eileen Hunter and supervised by Alexis Boyd-McEwan, keeps you on track with your tax liabilities. It ensures that you are never inadvertently penalised for the late submission of your Self Assessment Tax Return, and lets you know well in advance what tax bills are looming on the horizon. There are three main elements to tax compliance - compiling your Own Expenses and Capital Allowances Claim, completing the Partnership Tax Return and completing your own Self Assessment Tax Return. We'll look at each in turn.

When we first start acting for a practice, we discuss with the partners what personally incurred expenses they are entitled to claim tax relief on, gleaned from our experiences in preparing several hundred of these claims each year. Then a few days after the practice year end, you'll receive from us a request for the information needed to compile your Own Expenses and Capital Allowances Claim. This will normally be in the form of a standard questionnaire designed to prompt you to think about the different categories of expense that may be claimed. It is designed to make the task as quick and as easy as possible with plenty of white space for you to note any explanations of quirks with your expenses claim.

We can also provide you with an Excel spreadsheet to help you collate and maintain your expenses throughout the year. It will even total the expenses for you and provide you with an annual summary page.

Of course, some GPs prefer to give us piles of receipts to analyse, and at the other end of the scale, some maintain a record on their home PC and e-mail it to us. We're very flexible, and will fit in with each GP's own preferences. On receipt of the information, within a few days we will issue the draft Own Expenses and Capital Allowances Claim, for the GP's formal approval. Once approved, the details are logged onto the Partnership Tax Return in readiness for the practice accounts information to be entered subsequently. Partnership Tax Returns are issued by the Revenue each 5th April. The practice simply requires to send this in to us. If your practice's accounting year is not 31st March then we will request some further information from you. The information for the Return comes from the practice accounts and the partners' Own Expenses and Capital Allowances Claims, and provides information for the partnership pages in each partner's Self Assessment Tax Return. Failure to lodge the Partnership Tax Return by 31st January following the end of the tax year can be expensive - the fine is £100 for each person who was a partner in the practice during the year.

Self Assessment Tax Returns are also issued by the Revenue each 5th April. Our tax return questionnaire is issued on the same day, and should arrive in the same post. It is designed to prompt you to think about all the areas which make up the tax return and you tick only the boxes that apply to you. Where we hold mandates from you to obtain tax return information from e.g. banks and building societies, we also issue letters to them on 5th April requesting the information we require for your return.

On receipt of all of this, we will compile your return normally within a few weeks, and send this out to you for approval, with a bound copy for your own retention. At the same time we will advise you of your tax liabilities for the following January and July. As with the Partnership Tax Return, failure to lodge your personal Tax Return by 31st January following the end of the tax year also incurs a penalty of £100.

And if you are unfortunate enough to be selected for tax audit by the Inland Revenue, our optional TaxWatch Investigation Support contract offers the peace of mind of knowing that the professional fees cost of any such investigation is fully covered. This permits our team of experts to commit whatever time is necessary to fighting your corner and minimising the impact of this on you.

Buro_Pay Payroll Administration

Our payroll department is managed by Eric Smart who has over 20 years experience of PAYE. The key feature of our payroll service is flexibility. We can accept instructions from payroll clients in whatever way is most convenient for them - by mail, phone, fax or e-mail.

It is a completely comprehensive service - we provide security style sealed payslips, and arrange for payment of salaries by BACS in most cases, although cheque and cash are other alternatives. We can cope with weekly, four weekly and monthly payment intervals. We handle statutory sick pay, statutory maternity pay, family tax credits, pension deductions, and any other deductions required. You just send any PAYE paperwork to us, and we take care of it all, including all year end returns, P60s, P45s, etc.

The cost is surprisingly low, and is one of the fixed price services we offer. If you would like us to quote for this service, simply e-mail Eric at eric.smart@condie.co.uk providing him with a note of the number of employees you have and the frequency of payment to them.

TaxWatch

Many people in business live with the constant fear of being investigated by one of the several authorities empowered so to do, not because they are conscious of having done anything wrong, but because of the disruption to their business and personal life in trying to prove that everything is above board. Nevertheless, investigations almost always result in settlements being made, usually with interest and sometimes penalties on top.