Tax accountant or financial adviser or chartered accountant?

Sumarokov

Hello. I wonder if someone could advise me on the best "person" I need.

I have had investments sitting in a "gold bullion" account for around nine years. I also have some digital currency for the same amount of time. Now I would like to sell out around half of the "gold bullion" to buy a house. I will need to pay capital gains tax and it is complicated by the fact that I invested in euros (as I was living in the EU at the time) and do not have all the records of where that money came from (it was from my salary, but I worked freelance, so just deposited in my account at various times).

I am looking for an adviser to put all this in order and, most importantly, ensuring all is compliant with tax and money-laundering legislation here in the UK (and I live in Scotland for tax). Who is best to do this for me? Is it a chartered accountant? A tax adviser? A financial adviser? I do not need any advice on where to put the money, I just want to be sure of complying with all the legislation. Thanks.

bowlhead99

A financial adviser advises on what to do with your finances. As you know what you want to do with your finances, you don't need one of those.

If you don't know how to calculate the tax due on the difference between what you paid for the bullion (GBP equivalent at the relevant exchange rates from the time) and what you sell it for, and you want to get advice on this instead of just researching it for yourself, then yes you could see a tax adviser or accountant who is familiar with UK capital gains tax rules.

The money laundering rules come into play when you try to use the proceeds of your bullion sales to pay for (or put towards) the property.  You shouldn't need an accountant or tax adviser for that, as they don't know the regulations any better than the solicitor you'll be using to represent you in the property purchase. Your solicitor will need to satisfy themselves that they are happy with your source of wealth / source of funds for the transaction.

They will be able to see that the funds come from your bullion or digital currency sales because you will have a receipt or transaction record for it and the money will be sitting in a bank account. However, if that is recent, it only proves that you've had the bullion for a while and now sold it - it doesn't prove where you got the bullion (e.g. from saving employment or business income, or as the proceeds of crime). 

If you want to show where the money originally came from you would construct a 'trail' of transactions as best you could from the records you have (you may already have a transaction history of what you bought when, which you're using for your tax exercise), and hope to convince your solicitor that the amounts of gold you bought together with your other savings and investments were not unrealistic / unbelievable compared to the business income you were declaring that you earned in those years. Perhaps you have (or could get copies of) filed tax returns for those various previous years or have tax documents from an employer who paid the salary for those various years.  If you have €50k of earnings every year and buy €1k of gold every month or two, that's not very surprising, but if you had only ever earned €10k per year and now suddenly have €500k of gold, the solicitor would be surprised. 


On the tax side I am assuming here that the bullion isn't UK-issued sovereigns and Britannias which are legal tender and therefore CGT exempt, and instead represents bars or other non-exempt coinage (or an entitlement to them through a virtual account).

Sumarokov

That is a very good and exhaustive reply, thank you very much.