Accountant recommendation threads inc local requests

[jamesbrown]

From my own personal experience of working within a "local" accountancy practice, if MSC is going to go down to clients not taking tax advice on how to structure remuneration then the whole industry is going to collapse! There are a whole host of business owners who appoint an accountant for the very reason of steering them in the best direction of being tax efficient etc.

The issue is whether the advice is standardised across clients and clients accept it in a standardised way, especially if it's linked to some kind of default setting in a custom portal (then you are really stuffed, but there won't be many contractor accountants doing that, I hope ). The problem you face is that Christianuyi completely changed the landscape for ITEPA 9 in practice and there is the potential for the upcoming cases to change it again.

Honestly, I think a lot of the contractor accounting industry could be in a very tough spot, so while you may be presenting this for dramatic effect, you may not be far from the truth, specifically in terms of contractor specialist accountancies. Conversely, high street accountants deal with lots of different types of companies, so it's much harder to argue that they're offering "schemes" to groups of contractors that might be in the grey area where MSCP meets accountancy. It isn't about tax advice, in general, it's about how it's "packaged" and to whom. At the same time, I think there are, presently, more obvious targets than your practice.