Steph Wickham

But equally to use it as an opportunity.

How can we do better?

And a lot of our clients, depending on their tax profile, can arrange their affairs in a way legitimately to minimise tax leakage, which obviously is what everybody wants to do.

So what does that look like?

I mean, basic benign things like telling a client, you know, have you considered making an AVC contribution to your pension scheme up until the end of October, for example?

And clients will often go, well, I forgot I could do that.

Helping them claim tax credits or...

helping them understand that, for example, a certain foreign pension might qualify for a tax credit that maybe a dividend doesn't qualify for.

So if we're in a different category of non-domicile clients, we will work with clients to help them understand what makes more sense for us to bring to Ireland in terms of income that we're going to drag into the tax net.

So and then there's a broader piece as well isn't there around kind of helping people understand or plan for these major life events.

So people will often say things to us like but it's just a form and really it's more than that because it's actually representative of where you are on the totem pole in terms of what you owe revenue.

but it also should focus your mind on what's happened, what is going to happen and what's my plan for that.

So you need to be having that proactive conversation with your tax advisor.

And I'll give you an example of that that might resonate with people listening.

You know, when you talk about those kind of tax friendly jurisdictions, what commonly happens, and we've seen it, is that there will be a product sold to the client that is referred to as a pension.

And I believe that's very misleading because generally pensions are tax efficient products designed to provide for a tax efficient retirement.

But if you don't pay tax, then it's not really a pension.

And when you actually look at it, a lot of the times it's just an investment product.

So clients will come back to Ireland with these and they will keep calling it pension because that's what they were told it was.

And it's actually usually nothing like a pension in terms of how Irish revenue are likely to look at it.