Business account tax experience

General
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I help a couple of family friends informally with their finances.

One family have money sitting in a ltd company account, and I thought the investengine business account would be a good option for them.

The main apprehension they have is how comfortable their current accountant might be with tax treatment of Irish or lux domiciled ETFs ,

Based on the experience of people who have opened business accounts at other brokers (eg interactive brokers), it seems like it has been difficult the pull out the necessary information for their accountant (especially if some accounts are accumulating rather than distributing). In some cases it seems accountants have refused to do the work, or charged a lot more for it.

I’d be very keen to hear experiences from those who already have a business account with investengine.

How helpful are the consolidated tax certificates that investengine produces? Have you needed to produce your own custom reports in order to get your accountant to calculate tax?

Has it been a smooth experience with your accountants? Or have you needed to change accountants in order to find someone who is comfortable calculating tax correctly?

Thank you in advance.

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Something to be aware of is IE doesn’t allow transfers without selling the investments so for a LTD this is a major disadvantage as it triggers corp tax. I wish we had known this before using IE, we luckily only transfered a small amount and now gone elsewhere.

See In specie transfer out - #64 by mark66

Essentially for a business though, you want distributing funds as dividends are taxed at source so you do not pay tax on income received. The only tax due is if they are sold and you pay the tax as a profit on any gains in value. This should be fairly easy to work out and their reporting is quite good.

We were looking for long term investments with a view to hold the investments for 10-30 years so knowing that we were essentially locked into IE was a BIG NO NO for us.

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