Unnecessary but Expensive Fee for Furlough ‘Administration’ from Accountant

gbu_2

TaxAssist quoted me £245+vat to submit my Furlough claim!

sharpe106

Although it may be expensive do you work for free? It is additional work to what was you pay for. 

john039999

id just like to add my experience here, we are in the same boat, a small business whos income stopped on the 17th March. Our accountant is wanting to charge us £60 per month to handle the furloughing of ONE employee. They are and have been continuing to charge us for doing the payroll (what payroll??)  during this period. 
The issue we have is as our accountant is acting as our agent to the HMRC they have access to our goverment gateway account, they get an authorisation code to work on your behalf and as they do the work themselves (i.e payroll, tax returns etc) you are unable to change or add anything to the account without first retracting their access, this then messes up your payroll etc and takes a bit of time, to me, seems like accountants are kicking a business when they are down.

me_alfie

So it's not only my accountant that has quoted me a stupid fee. I was told it would cost me £175 to furlough my wife and I. I protested and asked for the paperwork and said that I would do it myself. What annoyed me wasn't only the fee, the amount and the fact that because the accountant would need to do it every month he'd charge that fee every month! I wasn't so annoyed until he said it'll be charged every month. 
Someone on one of these threads posted up do you expect it for free. It is understood that is an extra service. My accountant did it for me at a reduced fee of £75 after I protested and didn't give me the info I requested. It took him a total of 9 minutes. In this period of time he answered 2 phone calls and attended to someone knocking at his door. A fee of £175 is really a kick in between the legs when we are already going through a very difficult time. In my view it is an unreasonable fee for something that takes very little time and they already have all the data they need in front of them at their disposal. 
Talk about taking advantage! Been a family accountant for many years passed on through the family. I am really annoyed to say the very least but at least I can see he's not the only greedy one here.
One thing that he said which makes me laugh "we are a professional firm and will charge as we please. You cannot challenge us like that" when I said that his fee was unfair.

sharpe106

If you are unhappy with his fees then you can find someone else. It is obviously going to be cheaper to do it yourself.

BrassicWoman

It’s not the nine minutes to do it. It’s the days it’s taken to understand and keep on top of the ever changing rules, so your claim will survive audit. I pay my gas service person more than minimum wage because I don’t want to learn about boilers.

silvercar

"One thing that he said which makes me laugh "we are a professional firm and will charge as we please. You cannot challenge us like that" when I said that his fee was unfair."
Put a complaint into the firm. If that fails you can complain of unethical behaviour to whichever accountancy body the firm is authorised with.

bluep

Bear in mind, their hourly charge out rates and recovery.  Small accountancy firms are usually around £20-50 p/h for junior level, £80-150 p/h for partner level.  Recovery is usually around 50%-80%.  So even emails back and forth with you will have been time they can't recover.  I know it doesn't seem like much but when you have 50 clients and they all need 15-30 mins of emails and calls before you even agree to any further work that's more than half a week gone.

That probably explains the set up costs, but the ongoing monthly charge per employee is a bit rich if you are already paying them a retainer for payroll.

p.s. you don't want to know what my hourly charge out rate was in the Big4...it was eyewatering