[1]

Our West Country general practitioner manages to combine CPD and stocktaking on his trip to the Midlands.

* * *
30 March - A quick test for those of you with corporate clients: what is 31 March? Correct, it's the Companies House filing deadline for 31 May 2008 accounts. Just as well I remembered it or one of my larger clients' accounts would have been filed late! It seems that no matter how many checklists and spreadsheets we have there are just too many deadlines for limited companies - accounts, CT returns, P35, P11D - the list seems endless. We are forever on the verge of missing something. Endless possibilities to mess up and have to pay a fine that we should have avoided!

This spring's project is to update and improve our workflow monitoring systems and controls. We have all the software tools, we just need to use them fully.

* * *
27 March - What a week. Have just about recovered from my illness, but I seem to have been working at less than 100 per cent all week. I have a list of things I was going to do this week, a stack of files to review and jobs to finish - and most of them are still on my desk!

A bit of light relief today though: I was on a CPD course in Birmingham yesterday and one of our audit clients needed a stocktake attendance at their Coventry site today, so it seemed a bit of a waste to send an audit senior up from the West Country for a couple of hours when I was already on site, so I spent a nostalgic afternoon counting widgets and rolls of raw materials. Just like the good old days! Business travel is a hassle, so it's good to maximise the use of the time and cost of travelling if you can - and, in this case, the audit client can contribute towards the cost of a training trip to the Midlands to!

Which brings me on to another gripe - what's all this with Birmingham being the new CPD centre of the UK? Any number of companies are now basing their training and annual conferences in the Midlands, which seems to be inconvenient for most delegates instead of just a few! What's wrong with Bristol for the occasional conference? It would make my travel a lot easier, that's for sure.

* * *
24 March - Feeling a bit brighter today; managed most of the day in the office, but thankfully no clients to see.

This sort of thing hasn't happened to me often over the years, but it's not the first time a client has tried to poison me! I have nearly been bitten by clients' dogs on several occasions, and was threatened by an unpleasant looking bull many years ago in the days when small farming companies needed audits and I had to check their year end livestock numbers. But nothing much since - not that I'm complaining!! Luckily the client got it too so he hasn't been chasing me for the 2008 accounts which were due to go to him last week.

* * *
23 March - Sorry for the hiatus. Had an enjoyable day in London last Tuesday visiting a client - and almost immediately came down with the most crippling food poisoning! Some hospitality that was!!

I have crawled out of bed today and spent a couple of hours sorting out email and phone messages and I'm about to give up and go back to bed.

* * *
18 March - I'm not one for reading instruction manuals, but I'm glad I did with the smartphone. I have discovered that as well as normal and meeting (silent) profiles, there's also an automatic profile which works in conjunction with the diary. For the duration of any diary appointment you have entered (or imported from Outlook)the phone switches itself to silent automatically. Now that's what I call a great use of technology! Much more useful than a postage stamp sized web browser!!

* * *
16 March - the article and the ICAEW report make interesting reading. I have just replaced my old Razr mobile - broken with another 7 months or so of the contract left - with a £50 reconditioned i-mate Windows Mobile smartphone. It's not the latest technology, but it works for me.

I have had a PDA since the very first Palm Pilot came out, and love them. However, I have become increasingly frustrated at the artificial divide I seem to have created between my work-related PDA and the mobile phone which I carry everywhere. No problem now with the i-mate. I sync it with Outlook while I'm in the office so I have all my contacts and diary appointments on my phone, and that's all I need. I don't work away from the office enough to need email on the move, and I can log in to Outlook remotely from any PC anyway if I am away from my desk for any length of time. I never used any of the other apps and features on my PDA, so losing them is no big deal. And my eyesight doesn't make Web browsing on a tiny screen much fun anyway, so mobile Internet doesn't appeal! - though I do occasionally use the WAP browser for news and weather forecasts when I'm away from PC and TV and can't think of anything else to do.

I'm sure I'll graduate to an iPhone or some other smartphone in due course when I next get a free upgrade, but for now I've got all I need. My iPod is so small it's hardly a hassle to carry it around as well as the phone, so I'm not desperate to have both on one device.

* * *
11 March - I was just about to call my client in to tell him that his tax enquiry had ground to a halt and that in all honesty I didn't think we stood a chance of winning the pretty lightweight arguments we had put forward to the Inspector over the last 18 months ... when I received a letter from said Inspector who said, in summary, that he didn't agree with our arguments but he didn't think the case was "worth pursuing" and so he was closing the enquiry with no adjustment to the return! I had estimated the tax at stake at around £6,000 plus interest and penalties - not worth it?

So, did I:

a) phone the client and tell him he'd been let off the hook, not through any efforts of my own?
b) phone the client and tell him we had won a hard fought battle for him?
c) write to the client, telling him we'd won the case and enclosing a substantial bill?

I'm not saying, I'm afraid. I'll let you consider what YOU would have done in the circumstances.

But it was another one of those frustrating cases, of which I have had many over the years, where I have argued what I felt was a good case (OK, maybe not so good in some cases) and then been frustrated by internal directions or Revenue reorganisations which have suddenly resulted in the cases being dropped by the Inspector. So we'll never know if our case was good enough to win in the end. More annoyingly, we have not established a principle that we can follow in subsequent years for the client in question, so the underlying issue is still unresolved!

Tax. It's a mugs game!

* * *
9 March - The talking point in the office this month is P11Ds - do we or don't we? Not that we're considering NOT doing them at all, but how much should we promote them?

If there was ever a totally non-value-added, unwanted, unvalued and unappreciated service in the practitioner's portfolio, it must be P11D preparation. Especially for those clients who have only expenses and reimbursements to declare. I know from chatting to other accountants and bookkeepers that plenty of people out there don't even bother to complete P11Ds if there are no net taxable benefits - and some of these people are chartered accountants or chartered tax advisers!

We certainly don't intend to ignore P11Ds. The taxpayer has to make a declaration to say that the form is complete, so there's no getting away from it. But should we promote P11D preparation to all employer clients? If so, we need a system in place to follow through: we need to know whether clients want our help or not, we need to find out which ones are preparing their own P11Ds - and which ones are going to need chasing down to the wire!

And that's before we get started on fees. Do we offer P11Ds for a flat rate - per employee? Per P11D entry? Our experience shows that collating expenses and reimbursements is probably the most time-consuming task. Unfortunately, May to July is peak audit season, so we can't draft in junior audit/accounts people to crunch the numbers.

And all that's before we even get started on drafting the P11D letters and questionnaires to send out ...

* * *
6 March - We are now receiving coding notices in pairs for some clients, same employer, same tax year. My tax assistant is having to work out which code we want to use and then notifying the payroll departments and HMRC! Of the others, at least 1 in 3 is coding out investment income that we want to have taxed under SA, so that's another letter to HMR&C. And it all adds to WIP that probably won't get billed for another 10 or 11 months!

* * *
4 March - Now it's the Collector getting me going. We agreed a payment plan with them at the beginning of February, the client paid a lump sum on debit card over the phone and also set up a direct debit to pay the balance over five months. Sorted.

Until today, when he receives a letter from the enforcement office telling him that he's in default of the agreement and they want the whole amount immediately!

Phoned local recovery office: yes, the card payment has been credited to him, and yes the DD is set up, first payment to be collected on 6 March (it was meant to be 1st of the month, which is why I was getting worried when I saw the letter). But very sorry, we have done so many of these arrangements in the last month our systems haven't yet been updated, but I'll do it today!

Good grief (as Charlie Brown used to say)! How many more of these am I going to get?

* * *
3 March - It's that time of year. We've got the SA returns out the door, so in return HMR&C swamps us with stupid coding notices. I recall may years ago Which? magazine claimed that one in three PAYE code numbers was wrong - sounds about right to me even today. We generally don't tick the box asking for tax underpaid to be collected via PAYE - indeed many returns go in too late for this anyway. So why do tax offices insist on trying to code out every last penny when clients have a track record of paying under SA each year?

OK, I know the answer to that - they want to get the money asap, and making an employer deduct it is more reliable than waiting for the taxpayer to send them a cheque, especially in the current economic climate.

But they're still trying it on in my opinion. We have a steady flow of letters going back to them asking for code numbers to be restored and for tax to be paid under SA next January.

And to add insult to injury, each agent's copy of coding notices comes in a separate envelope, each with a leaflet "Here is your new tax code for 2009-10" - what a colossal waste of money, paper and resources! That's an envelope and leaflet that I have to pay my local council to take away and recycle. Total madness.

* * *

* * *
Last month our West Country general practitioner emerged from tax return filing and contemplated CPD and the recession in his .