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I attended an event recently where I had the opportunity to talk to some research and development (R&D) specialists and their clients.
It is great to be able to hear again, first hand, what is happening in the tax marketplace. Two things struck me. The first was a conversation with a client who said just how fed up his team were at the constant cold-calling his company received from people trying to sell them R&D services without having done the slightest research about what his company did. The second was talking to advisers, who shared horror stories about having to sort out HMRC enquiries into claims where the company on whose behalf they had been made had literally no idea how the claim had been put together.
These issues are not new: we have discussed them several times in the magazine, but the evening brought home to me just how much of a problem there is. It is not just confined to R&D. There are problems with tax repayment companies and with promoters of schemes which are so aggressive that there is no chance that they could ever succeed. The case for some form of consumer protection in the tax sphere is now overwhelming even if it will bring additional cost and complexity to those firms – the vast majority – that provide an excellent service to clients.
One comment summed it up for me. Somebody told me of a conversation with a disgruntled client of a dubious firm who said that she could not believe that there is no regulation in the tax marketplace. Virtually everything else has a form of regulation or consumer standards and she had assumed, until things went wrong, that the same applied to tax. She will not be alone in thinking that.
If you do one thing...
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