Accounting negligence

Jlindsay11

Hi everyone.

New to the forum and pretty sure this thread is in the wrong category. Admin feel free to move if it does not fit.

I was wondering if anyone has any experience of a negligent accountant in the past?

I am currently in a dispute with my previous accountant and not sure where to go from here. I am a self employed sole trader.

I was with the accountant for over 10 years and thought they were doing a good job as they did charge high fees and had a good reputation.

I moved accountants about a year ago as a friend recommended another local accountant who charged much lower fees. Thats when we realised all the mistakes that the previous accountant had made.

Firstly, I had an employee which i had been paying national Insurance etc for. The employment came to an end and I told my accountant to clarify this with HMRC. I continued to get letters from HMRC for unpaid NI for the employee for over a year and asked the accountant about this many times. They said that they had sorted it with HMRC at the time and this was a mistake on their part. Turns out that they didn’t tell HMRC and now I owe HMRC £1500 in charges.

The next issue was that they made a mistake with my VAT calculation where i was paid out £10,000 for the purchase of a new piece of machinery. My new accountant has found that it was a mistake and i now need to repay this money. I understand that this was never my money in the first place, however it is going to be a struggle to pay it back.

Finally they also messed up our tax returns, which meant that we owed HMRC £30,000. This was a very unexpected bill and we had to refinance a piece of machinery at a very high interest rate to raise the funds.
Our new accountant managed to fix the mistake and HMRC repaid the money. However we were left with a shortfall due to the high interest rate of the finance.

I spoken to the previous accountant at the time when the mistake was discovered and they said that they would honour any shortfall. Once we found out the extent of the mistake they offered us £1,000, which we rejected.
It was then passed to their complaints team, who promised and promised to get back to us. They promise a date to give us an answer and then wait a month or two before getting back to us.
This has been going on for well over a year now. Finally we said we would go to their governing body ICAS and they told us they would reevaluate their offer. They came back with a figure of £2,000 which again we rejected. They told us they would think over and get back to us within 14 days. We waited for over a month and chased them multiple times. They finally said they are standing by their offer of £2000 and this is their final decision.

There is also the matter of the bill for our current accountant for sorting out the mess.

This has been a long stressful process for my wife and I and struggled to make ends meet to repay HMRC at the time. I feel the figure of £2000 is just not good enough when I was paying them £5000+ per year when i was with them. This is only the mistakes from 1 years accounts. I have no idea if there were other mistakes made throughout my time with them.

I don’t know where to go from here. We can accept their offer and walk away or we can go further, whatever that may be. We do not have the funds to fight them in court, however I do not want them to get away with it.

Any advice would he much appreciated.

Thank you