Accountants pay to stay in touch

Press, 31 January 1989, Page 26

Accountants pay to stay in touch

By MEERA LYON PA Wellington Accountants are having to pay for educational courses to keep up with the Government’s tax reform. They will be joined by lawyers at $473-a-head conferences being planned for this year as part of a Society of Accountants education programme. “There is very little in the Tax Act that hasn’t been tampered with ... it’s close to a rewrite and we have to spend a lot more time keeping up with it,” said tax accountant, Mr John Shewan. He is chairman of the Governmentestabished Tax Education Office which will help run the two-day conferences in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Mr Shewan said a fundamental change in the tax system came with introduction in 1986 of new accrual rules, requiring income and expenditure to be assessed for tax purposes in the same period in which they occur. Other changes included the new imputation system for the taxing of company dividends, the new international tax regime and the overhauled provisional tax system. Mr Shewan was pleased lawyers and accountants were working together to keep on tOp of the changes. “There is a degree of competition between the two, but, particularly these days, woe betide either profession if they

don’t consult each other in this area,” he said. In this respect it was important to note the new penalty regime, as it was no longer easy to have a penalty waived if a mistake was made. Last year more than 3000 chartered accountants attended the society’s tax course. At least the same number is expected to attend this year’s course which the society claims is the biggest of its kind. Director of the society’s continuing education department, Melody Gilmour, said the course was aimed at being more topical. “There has been such a massive change around in the tax area and people these days cannot afford just to sit around in an office and ignore it — they have to get out there and keep up to date,” she said. “We are producing our programme on a six-monthly basis now so we can pick up on issues quickly and we’ve noticed a great increase in people attending the courses, including people who are not accountants." They tended to be business people, particularly from small businesses, who had to deal with the tax area. The society’s annual summer school was also offering several workshops on negotiation, presented by Jane Chart, a senior law lecturer at the University of Canterbury.