Just how comfortable are you that all your work is being done correctly and you’re not getting to a place where your business is falling foul of things?
Many people believe that they are being well served by their professional advisors because, well, they’re professional advisors. Sort of like saying I know they’re good because I say so!
In many cases, this is not quite right. We’ve seen numerous occasions where a potential customer has approached us with a view to doing their work. The thing is that we will find (usually) a raft of issues where there are significant omissions from their reporting/tax. I’ll give you some examples:
- a medical specialist who came to us – he was structured completely incorrectly – we sorted that out and realised a saving of $16,000 for him EVERY YEAR from then on;
- a customer who approached us about doing their work – they have a number of commercial buildings on which their then accountant wasn’t claiming the depreciation – cash savings to him of around $25,000 per year EVERY YEAR from then on including amendments for previous years getting them tax back; and
- customers who came to us to review their situation – we were able to implement strategies which gained them about $10,000 tax back for previous years and enabled them to get additional deductions EVERY YEAR from then on.
In all cases, these people were using advisors who they believed were doing their work correctly – they were, it’s just that they weren’t thinking about things as we do with the consequence that they were paying far more tax than they needed to be.
We don’t pretend to be the stars out there – it’s just that, based on our experience, we see a lot of opportunity to do high value work for people where they haven’t been aware of what they can be doing.
So have a think about what you (and your advisors) know and don’t know – odds-on there are a range of unknown unknowns out there that are potentially costing you money.
