Are you paying too much tax?
10 March 2010
Are you paying too much tax? The tax year end to 5 April 2010 is fast approaching. There are important tax planning and tax saving opportunies.
Please call us urgently if you want to have a no obligation free of charge meeting to discuss your personal financial and tax circumstances? You do not need to change your current tax advisor. This is to give you an extra assurance whether you are getting the right tax advice, or whether you need to change your current system of extracting profits from your business and/or employment.15 October 2009
Of the 286,000 qualified accountants, you can add a fairly large number of unqualified accountnats who are also allowed to practice as public practice accountants.
No doubt, about 50% of these say 336,000 accountants are no longer working as accountants, but as business people, MPs, etc. etc.
If we take the remaining 168,000 accountants who work as accountants in public practice, industry, commerce, public sector, voluntary sector, you will see that only a handful work for the public sector.
While the public sector absorbs 45% of GDP, only 15% of qualified accountants work for the government. No wonder government accounts are rather weak and the private sector does indeed take advantage of this weakness.UK's Professional Oversight Board has published the 2009 Annual Survey (www.frc.org.uk/pob) titled "Trends in the Accountancy Profession.
UK with a population of 60 million has 286,000 qualified members, that is just under 5% of the population.
While the entire EU, with a population of say 500 million in 32 countries, has about 500,000+ qualified accountants. That is around 1% of the population.
The six number of bodies (ICA IN ENGAND, ACCA, CIMA, CIPFA is should be reduced to three bodies and common ground found. There is a lot of overlap, duplication and waste of resources the way it stands now.
USGAAP, UKGAAP, and the currently being developed International Financial Reporting Standards has failed miserably as they have been dominated by being Anglo-American practices without sometimes taking into account other global players accountancy practices.
One example is the recently published IFRS for SMEs issued on 9 July 2009. We believe the IFRS should be the same for a company of any size, a government department, or a charity.
ASB (Accounting Standard Board) should consider one stardard for public, private, voluntary and charity sectors. The principles do not change whether a transaction is small or large to ensure correct treatment of the transaction in a well disciplined financial control system.