2 Points
Joined April 2021
I need your valuable suggestions before deciding upon the options available to me. So, please respond.
I have an LLP company in Hooghly, a CA firm was responsible for taking care of all our compliances. We hired a firm to ensure that our backs were covered because we are a team of technical individuals with hardly any knowledge of compliances. Well, that is why we hire such firms in the first place, isn't it?
For the last 3 years, we were always paying late fees, etc because the information would be provided to us by this partner firm only after the due dates. But, we always accommodated their excuses and maintained amicable terms. Last year, they raised us an invoice for their services until 2018 - 2019 and we were unable to pay the full invoice because of the sudden COVID situation. Our clientele had suddenly disappeared, the company had no business and there was an acute shortfall of funds. We kept requesting our CA firm to ensure that we did not have any more penalties as that would further put a dent on our finances. The CA firm kept turning down our request and denied to even communicate further until all their dues were cleared. They had registered everywhere using their own email id's and phone numbers, so logging into the ITR portal was also not possible.
Finally, we cleared their dues in March this year. They re-initiated communication and on the first instance informed us that our company had already incurred a late fees of INR 65,000 + for ITR, ROC and KYC filings of 2019 - 2020. When asked how they could just stand by and watch us getting fined on a daily basis and never bothering to even send us a tip of what was to come, they simply responded that it was not their responsibility to do so.
We ended up paying them almost a lakh in terms of late fees, their service fees, etc. Thereafter, they sent us a new invoice with the service fees for 2019 - 2020 which now included a "last minute emergency service fees" of INR 5,000/- on top of the usual bill. When we asked them to send us the challans and receipts against the filings for the purpose of internal accounting, they clearly denied and sent us an email that we need to first clear their latest invoice, then someone needs to go to their office with an authorization letter signed duly by all the designated partners to collect the required documents.
It would be anyone's guess that we do not want to work with this firm anymore. But, we also want to send firms like these a strong message that this was gross negligence of duties on their part, for which my company had to pay heavily. On top, the challans and receipts are properties of our company as they are issued in its name.
Please tell me the corrective and recoursive action we can take here in this matter.
Looking forward to your feedback and suggestions.
Best regards,
Anupam Chatterjee