No named accountant on your file
Why it matters
When you ring the firm, you should reach the person who handles your work — or someone who knows you well enough to answer without a 24-hour delay. The pattern to watch for: you join a firm via a friendly sales call, and from the second engagement onward you speak to a different junior every time. Your year-end is handled by whoever is free that week. Nobody owns the relationship. This is structural in firms that have scaled by stripping out partner involvement to keep margins up. The problem isn't that juniors do work — every firm uses juniors. The problem is that nobody senior is reviewing the whole picture, spotting the £10k mistake in the corporation tax computation, or proactively raising a tax-planning conversation in October before the year closes.
How to test for it
Ask before signing: "Who is my named accountant? Who reviews their work? If I email at 4pm on a Tuesday with a question, who replies, and within how many working hours?" A good firm will name a partner or senior manager, a reviewer above them, and a published response standard. A weak firm will say "the team" — that is the answer telling you nobody owns your file.