Negligent accountant

[divlong]

I have a friend who is the leasehold tenant of a pub. She has been struggling somewhat recently and while going through some paperwork with her it looked to me as though she was paying too much VAT.

A quick calculation seemed to show that the accountant was not including the rent payed to the brewery in the accounts, nor claiming back the VAT on it.

She has now changed accountant and the latest VAT return seems to confirm that this initial suspicion was correct.

The new accountant is now going back over all the previous returns, but by my reckoning she has been overpaying VAT by over �1500 per quarter for about two and a half years.

I assume that she can claim back this overpayment from the Excise people, but does she have any comeback on the accountant?

She has had to take out a couple of loans to keep afloat which wouldn't have been necessary if the accountant had got it right.

It would be nice if she could recover the extra loan costs, the cost of redoing all the returns and perhaps a part of the original accountant's fees.

TIA

Duncan

[terambulan]

The usual riposte from accountants to absolve themselves is "I could only work on the figures given!"

[divlong]

I agree, but in this case we know he had the figures as they are on the monthly invoice from the brewery which also includes beer purchases. Which makes it even stranger, IMO.

He certainly put the beer through the accounts :-)

[buildersmate]

Is this accountant a member of one of the professional institutions for accountants?

[divlong]

I rather doubt it, but I'm not sure.

It did seem odd to me that he didn't charge VAT on his services, so he obviously didn't have many clients.

[buildersmate]

AKA his turnover was less than around �60k pa.