Background: I realize with my Dutch setup, it's more tax beneficial to pay myself a dividend from my Irish company directly to myself in the Netherlands. So I attempt to change how I'm doing things.
I tell my Irish tax advisor in an email. They ask to set up a call with one of their team. We do call number one & I explain the situation but seems like a complete waste of time. She sets up another call with the firm owner & obviously gives him some context - he comes in briefed. On call 2, he mocks me for believing there could be such a tax advantage. "Was your friend drunk when he told you this?", "I hear you think there's some all-you-can-eat tax buffet", "Don't believe everything you read on ChatGPT" - direct quotes from my meeting notes.
I'm stubborn so I continue digging and find out that I was right - the tax advantage does exist. I email the tax company and they completely gloss over their original advice, don't apologize etc
To prepare the dividend is somewhat messy because I have a hold-co structure with investors. So i have to email each of them, get them to sign a document and give me their bank account details. I ask the firm to help me with that email/admin because I'm not sure what the documents are and why they're needed - they decline to help with the email.
At some point we have a discussion on the financials & how the dividend works out versus paying myself through Dutch payroll. We are already paying this tax firm 8,000 per year for 2 entities, one of which has zero activity. I assume that them helping with my dividend is part of what I'm paying for. If it's not, when we're discussing the numbers I assume that if there's costs on their side, they'll mention them, as it's clearly material to whether the dividend makes sense financially. At no point do they mention any additional costs.
3 weeks later they send me an un-itemized invoice for 4,350. They seem to have included the calls that they asked for, including the one where they mocked me. I ask them to please tell me about costs up front next time - they don't acknowledge that email.
To be fair - the firm are detail oriented with the paperwork and making sure the regulatory boxes are checked. But the actual work required here is, from what I can tell - creating word documents for each dividend. Their fee for doing this is €4,350 for the initial work, and then €1,500 for every single dividend payment.
My Take: I shouldn't need an external firm to simply help me to pay myself a dividend in the first place. This should be part of a simple software tool given to business owners by the government. We should be able to see our shareholders, see their DWT exemption status, and click a button to inform the government of a dividend payment. There is no inherent complexity to understanding the logic - all of the complexity is administrative. We've had web software for 20 years, and my company collects and pays tens of thousands a year in tax revenue to the government (I don't even live in Ireland). And still the system carries so much complexity that an entire industry exists to navigate it.