Spotlight falls on rogue tax advisers
Unregulated practices are coming under increasing investigation asfears surface that self-assessment will enable unqualified tax advisers toflourish.
Fears that self-assessment will prompt a huge growth in rogue tax advisers has prompted a series of investigations into unregulated practices.
The Chartered Institute of Taxation, the English ICA and the Consumers Association said this week they were examining the impact of self-assessment on the market for tax advice work.
John Andrews, president of the CIoT, said a report would be ready next month, while the English ICA and Consumers Association said they had just begun to collect the views of their members.
The consumer watchdog expressed its concern at the potential for taxpayers to be given bad advice under self-assessment in the May edition of Which?
magazine. ‘We think there is going to be a problem and are very uneasy about the situation,’ said the association’s tax expert Philip Telford.
‘We are in a highly evolving situation with self-assessment,’ said Andrews.
‘It is difficult to know what is going on at the moment. Our report should give us hard evidence.’
The CIoT is concerned that unregulated tax advisers will give the institute a bad name and force the Government to rush through statutory regulation.
Andrews said he was relaxed about the introduction of independent regulation for tax advisers, but ‘the last thing the tax advisory profession needs is regulation under the Financial Services Act’.
The CIoT has employed Bristol University economist Sue Green, a member of the English ICA’s tax faculty and author of a report last year for tax charity TaxAid, to conduct research. She will be highlighting the top-100 worst cases of bad practice.
Mike Savage, an official at the Adjudicator’s Office, which has been critical of tax advice supplied by accountants, questioned whether regulation was the solution. ‘We have seen very poor work from qualified and unqualified tax advisers.’
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A spokesman for the English ICA’s tax faculty said it had objected to independent or statutory regulation in the past because it was highly bureaucratic and costly, ‘but everything is in the melting pot now’.