An initial consultation with a prospective tax accountant is your best opportunity to find out whether they genuinely understand your business, or whether you are speaking to someone reciting a standard sales pitch. Too many business owners let the accountant lead the entire conversation and walk away having learned little beyond the headline fee. Asking the right questions, in the right order, changes this dynamic entirely. It puts you in control of the meeting and gives you concrete evidence to compare against other firms. Below are the questions worth asking any London tax accountant before you commit, along with what a good answer to each one actually sounds like.
What Are Your Qualifications and Professional Memberships?
This should always be the first question, because it establishes a baseline of trust before anything else. A good answer names specific bodies, such as the ICAEW, ACCA or, for genuine tax specialism, the Chartered Institute of Taxation, and the person should be comfortable telling you their registration can be verified publicly. Vague answers about being "fully qualified" without naming a body, or defensiveness at being asked, are worth noting carefully. Qualifications alone do not guarantee good advice, but the absence of any recognised credential is a serious warning sign, particularly for tax work where mistakes can be expensive.
It is also worth asking specifically who, within the firm, holds these qualifications, since larger practices sometimes market the credentials of senior partners who will have little direct involvement in your account. If a junior member of staff will actually be preparing your returns, ask about their own qualifications and level of supervision separately, rather than assuming the firm's headline credentials automatically apply to whoever ends up handling your work day to day.
How Many Clients Do You Act for in Situations Like Mine?
This question tests whether the firm's day-to-day experience actually overlaps with your circumstances. If you are a limited company approaching the VAT threshold, ask how many similar clients they currently support through that transition. If you are a landlord, ask how much of their client base involves property income. A confident, specific answer, ideally with a rough number rather than a vague "lots", suggests genuine relevant experience. An accountant who cannot answer this with any specificity may be less familiar with your situation than their marketing suggests.
It can also be worth asking a slightly different version of this question: how has their approach to clients in your situation changed over recent years, reflecting updates to tax rules or new reliefs that have become available. A firm with genuinely current, relevant experience should be able to point to something specific that has evolved in how they advise similar clients, rather than describing an approach that sounds identical to what they might have said five years ago, before several rounds of legislative change had taken effect.
How Do You Stay Current With Changing Tax Rules?
Tax law changes regularly, and a specialist accountant treats staying current as part of the job. Good answers mention structured continuing professional development, membership bodies with training requirements, or specific recent changes they can discuss confidently, such as adjustments to thresholds or reliefs relevant to your business. If the answer is essentially "we keep up with things generally" without any concrete detail, press further before moving on, since vague reassurance on this point often reflects a genuinely thin process behind it.
What Happens if HMRC Opens an Enquiry Into My Return?
How an accountant answers this question tells you a great deal about their real-world experience. A specialist should be able to describe the process clearly: how they would respond on your behalf, what documentation would be needed, and roughly how such situations tend to resolve. They should also be upfront about whether enquiry support is included in their standard fee or charged separately, and whether they offer fee protection insurance to cover the additional cost of a prolonged enquiry. An accountant who seems unfamiliar with this process, or brushes the question aside, has likely handled fewer enquiries than a genuine specialist would have.
Will I Have a Named, Consistent Point of Contact?
Particularly at larger firms, smaller clients can end up passed between junior staff with limited senior oversight, which undermines the value of paying for specialist expertise in the first place. Ask directly who would actually handle your account day to day, how experienced that person is, and how accessible they would be if you needed a quick answer. A clear, specific response, ideally naming an individual rather than describing a generic team, is a good sign that you will receive consistent, accountable service rather than being shuffled around. It is also worth asking what happens if that named contact is unavailable, such as on leave, so you know a sensible fallback plan already exists.
What Is Included in Your Fee, and What Costs Extra?
Fee transparency protects you from unpleasant surprises later. Ask for a written breakdown of what is included, whether the quote is fixed or could change once they review your paperwork, and specifically what happens with additional work such as ad hoc tax advice, correcting historic errors, or dealing with an HMRC enquiry. A firm offering a genuinely thorough bookkeeping and accounting service should be able to set this out clearly without hesitation, since transparent pricing is generally a sign of a well-run, confident practice rather than one trying to disguise costs until later. Asking for this in writing before you commit is a small step that can save considerable frustration further down the line.
Can You Walk Me Through an Example of Tax Planning You Have Delivered?
Without breaching client confidentiality, a genuine specialist should be able to describe, in general terms, an example of proactive tax planning they have delivered for a similar business, such as restructuring how income is drawn, identifying an overlooked relief, or advising on the right VAT scheme. This question separates firms that only handle compliance from those that add real value beyond filing returns on time. If every answer circles back to "we just make sure everything is filed correctly", that may be a perfectly fine general accountancy service, but it is not the specialist tax expertise many growing businesses genuinely need.
Pay attention, too, to how naturally the example comes out. A genuine specialist will usually be able to recall a relevant example fairly quickly, because proactive planning is a routine part of how they work rather than an occasional exception. Hesitation, or an example that sounds unusually generic and could apply to almost any business, may suggest that this kind of proactive work happens less often than the firm's marketing implies, and it is a reasonable point to probe further before making your final decision.
The Bottom Line
A short list of well-chosen questions can tell you more about a prospective tax accountant in twenty minutes than any amount of website marketing. Ask about qualifications, relevant client experience, how they stay current, how they handle HMRC enquiries, who your actual point of contact would be, what your fee genuinely covers, and for real examples of tax planning delivered. A firm confident in its accounting and bookkeeping services will welcome these questions rather than deflect them, and the clarity you gain from asking will make your eventual decision far easier and better informed.
Looking for a Tax Accountant in London?
Let's talk about what your business actually needs
Fred Michael & Co Ltd is a tax accountant in London built around your business, not a one-size-fits-all package. Get in touch and we will talk through where your business is now and where it needs to go.