Fee protection – The risks & the benefits
HMRC are struggling with a Tax Gap of £33billion! Find out what we’re doing to minimise what they’re getting from our clients…
Transcript:
Hi, and welcome to another episode of BaranovTV, designed to demystify the world of accounts and tax and to help your business grow.
Now, today I want to talk to you about fee protection cover and the fee protection scheme that we offer to all of our clients. Actually, we don’t offer it, we give it to them straightaway.
We give fee protection to all of our clients for two reasons:
- Firstly, because we want to be absolutely transparent about our fees, so when we provide a quotation for the services that we think a client would need, we include fee protection in that so that they don’t get another invoice later in the year.
- And also, we want to make sure that we give our clients peace of mind in as many different ways as we can.
So fee protection for us is standard to everybody; that enables us to fight their corner should the Revenue ask any awkward questions, up to our fees being £100,000, so it’s huge! We can pretty much just keep going, which means that clients don’t have to make a decision about whether to keep fighting or whether to pull back and just accept what the Revenue is saying, which we have known of in the past.
- Revenue enquiries are time-consuming.
- They’re stressful.
- They’re worrying.
- AND they can be really expensive.
So our fee protection scheme, we think, is a brilliant godsend to our clients, just to give them that peace of mind.
Anyone can be selected for a Revenue inquiry.
It doesn’t have to be the fact that you’ve done something wrong. HMRC will randomly select taxpayers, which means that you don’t have to have done anything wrong. It means that they can find fault and they can start to ask questions, and that can go backwards and forwards over a long period of time.
Our cover enables us to attend meetings, prepare for meetings, travel to meetings. It means that we can speak to the Revenue on your behalf, and it means that very often we can close them down very, very quickly.
We have added benefits as part of the scheme, not just the fact that we can fight your corner on your behalf, but also Croner, who are our supplier, provide advice lines where you have unlimited access to experts in:
- Commercial legal
- HR
- Employment law
So they’re really helpful because they give you the peace of mind when you get a question that you may not know that’s a bit more technical. They’re there to give you the peace of mind and the right answers.
It also allows US to deal with the enquiry rather than passing it to a third party, which is what happens with a lot of the other schemes that are out there. For example with the Federation of Small Businesses, which does then mean that the Revenue will ask them, they will ask us, we will give the answer, they will give the answer. So you just get it delayed. There will always end up being a fee from us because of the time that it takes, and there is a risk of Chinese whispers occurring too as the information gets passed from pillar to post.
We believe that fee protection is essential for business owners to have peace of mind, and that enables the business owner to crack on with their business while we deal with the Revenue. And that’s what we’re here to do, to provide you with that peace of mind and that protection.
So with that in mind, I’ll make sure that I send details out to all of our clients to make sure that they’ve got access to those advice lines. Please do use them, because that’s what they’re there for. And in the meantime, we’re going to finalize the renewal for our scheme for the next 12 months, and I’ll see you all very soon.
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