What are the career options for an individual to become an independent practicing chartered accountant?

An individual chartered accountant has a wide range of options after establishing himself as an independent account and tax practitioner. The services of a tax practitioner range from tax filing services to management consultancy services. Ideally, an individual must be a practicing member of the chartered accountants' institute in order to provide such services. In order to be a practicing member, a qualified chartered accountant must apply for securing the certificate of practice from the chartered accountants’ institute of his country as well in the wake of becoming a practicing member. Let us make ourselves aware of different services that an independent practicing member can provide:

●    Income Tax Services – Small and medium enterprises, along with large corporations, require income tax services for effectively complying with the tax legislative framework. The tax compliance framework is a very complex and dynamic aspect that requires persistent and periodical filing of income tax and tax deducted at source (TDS) returns. This task requires an expert to fill in and furnish numerous financial and tax-related information in predefined formats to the income tax department. Also, experienced individuals may also start their income tax consultancy as well wherein they provide valuable insights to businesses to implement tax planning as the businesses always lay more emphasis on planning and saving income tax by availing benefits of income tax-related exemptions, tax holidays, or deductions. On several occasions, the income tax department provides production-linked incentives to understand, comprehend and implement which; enterprises do require income tax advisory from the independent tax practitioners.

●     GST and other indirect taxes consultancy – The businesses also have to comply with indirect tax provisions as different types of indirect taxes generally include Goods and Service Tax, Customs, or other levies that are basically imposed on businesses for getting involved in trading and manufacturing activity. Ideally, indirect tax regimes are very complex and bulky for businesses to comprehend, and hence the businesses require indirect tax consultancy services from a skilled, experienced, and knowledgeable chartered accountant who may be specialized in the indirect tax universe.

●  Indirect tax returns filing - Looking at the behemoth extent and complex structure of the indirect taxes, small businesses cannot implement and comply with different aspects of indirect tax compliance, including filling indirect tax returns periodically as may be applicable to their constitution of businesses and specific industry in which the business may be operating. To get this indirect tax return filing done, independent tax practitioners provide cost-effective services pertaining to indirect tax computation and filing. 

●   Tax representation – A challenging An even more interesting aspect of independent tax practice could be the services of tax representation for and on behalf of small or large businesses. On many occasions, businesses have to respond to the notices of income tax or indirect tax department or participate in the tax assessment proceedings, which can be done with the assistance of independent tax practitioners only. The tax practitioners possess huge technical expertise and valuable insights, which they can use to guide advice and duly represent the businesses before one or the other jurisdictional tax authorities.

●  Audit services – A yet another unique service is related to tax and internal audits of the businesses that can only be provided by practicing chartered accountants. The audit services require practicing chartered accountants to examine the sanctity of the company’s accounts, financial information, and internal controls in order to opine on the adequacy of facts and figures reflected in the company’s financial statements and give a reasonable degree of assurance to various users of financial information.

Thus, on having perused the above various kinds of services, we get to know about the multitude of tax filing services that an independent practicing chartered accountant can provide to individuals, small and medium enterprises, or large corporations.