Hi all, My Accountant just recently started working with me but he's off on hols now, I'm really concerned here. I have worked via a LTd company the last two calendar years, and on the understanding that 1) Dividends are payable on all income received from the company, and ; 2) You should keep aside 23% of everything you intend to pay yourself aside until the end of the fiscal year. So as per 2), I just paid myself 77% every few months of whatever money was left in the account. Then, in February this year, thinking that the end of the first accounting period was coming up, I zeroed down the company account , ie paid myself whatever was left. Luckily, I beat that date, but since spent that money. I did some more trading later this year, and I've now got enough left in the company account to pay 10% on everything I've drawn out since I formed the company (probably closer to 20%, but the Acct is checking). Thankfully the Acct managed to get the submission dates moved to early Feb 2016. BUT...here's my big worry...basically I didn't know dividends had to have counterfoils raised, and they need to be paid before the end of the first period. I thought I'd just have to pay the dividend whenever the tax was requested after my SA...to top it all off, just before he went on holiday he talked briefly about 'avoiding fraud' !!! He had told me to request my UTR's (for both myself and my ltd), which I'm doing now, I've got my personal UTR, hopefully the LTD UTR will too get here before January, but he's off till then. Right now I'm imagining all sorts, jail time at worst, IR35 + never being a Director again at best, I've googled around, and can't find relevant info, can someone please give me a non-optimistic idea of how hard they're going to come down on me? Thanks, JB

For FY 2010-2011 I was a contractor and the director of my own Ltd company paying myself a £12k annual salary. On top of this, I paid myself a couple of thousand in dividends each month. On the annual tax credit returns form I failed to specify the dividends because I received some lousy advice from a tax credit officer to say that I do not need to declare these. It all sounds incredibly silly now but it was all new to me at the time and I didn't challenge as well as I should've, combine this with the fact that the "Other Income" box on the form mentions pretty much everything except for dividends. It could be she misunderstood the question but the answer, and I remember it vividly, was that I do not need to "worry about this". I even remember telling my wife about it at the time and we were both very surprised. If there is a recording of the phone conversation then I'm sure I'm covered and correct about what I heard. About 6 months after the FY ended and after I submitted my company accounts (which of course clearly showed the dividend payments), I became very uncomfortable with the idea that I didn't need to "worry about" my dividends, so I called the support line again only to hear them confirm what I feared. So right there and then I declared that the income information provided for FY 2010-2011 was wrong and needed a major update of around some £30k! I explained the situation and was told that as the correction was for the previous period, it could take up to 3 months for someone to look into this and fix. I've chased them up twice and every time I call they do not seem concerned and have no appreciation of my desire to fix the mess. It's now 8 months on and nothing has been done. At the very least I would've expected them to drastically reduce current payments. So, what do I do about this as I'm not getting anywhere with an update? I hate things like this occupying my mental state and the current system offers no feedback or case update. I really wouldn't want them to write to me in 3 years accusing me of fraud once they've linked the director dividend payments with the declared income for that year!