Accountant - is this expensive ?

My wife has been self employed two years. She has not told the revenue about this. I have been a PAYE worker all my life. We have been to see an accountant to try and sort out our tax affairs. We have had preliminary discussions with him. He says that he will sort out our affairs and get us up to date. He says full tax returns done by him covering the last four years will cost us around €5k. For that he will do our accountants and will represent us to the revenue. Is that expensive ? I have heard much smaller figures bandied around for yearly tax returns.

Very difficult without more information as to the extent of her self-employment. However you said 4 years returns and her self-employed for 2. So you are paying for 2 years totally PAYE and 2 years with her self-employed returns. Unless she has a retail business with reasonable level of work to be done and there are VAT or other issues involved also, I would be inclined to suggest you get additional quotations from other accountants.

Less than what I pay mine annually assuming that the period is two years.

ONQ

Get a quote from another accountant or two, that is the best way to get an idea of what they offer. Also each may have different ideas and you can then play them off against each other. I finally found a great accountant for my own company who costs half the price of the previous one and gives me the information I request (amazing!). He's in South Co. Dublin if you are interested.

It does depend on the level of activity of your wife and the state of her records. But it does appear to be expensive as I guess she is providing a service and that she has very few transactions etc.

I strongly recomend shopping around and maybe post the area where you live so that other people could make suggestions to you.

This site will get you a quote from 3 different accountants in Dublin

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Or you could try [broken link removed]

I am an accountant in practice and €5,000 does not sound bad. however you should clarify how many years returns the accountant is doing. You say that your wife was self employed for 2 years which should mean 2 years tax returns yet he is going to do 4 years tax returns!?! you could be paying for something that you dont need if this is the case.