Choosing an accounting firm in Malaysia: eleven questions worth asking

Businesses usually change accountants for the same handful of reasons: work arrived late, nobody explained anything, the person who knew the file left, or the fee kept growing in ways nobody had flagged. Almost all of these are visible before you sign, if you ask.

On scope and fees

• What is explicitly included in the annual fee, and what is billed separately?
• What triggers additional billing — a HASiL query, a late document set, an extra entity?
• How and when will you tell us a job has gone beyond scope, and before or after the work is done?

On people

• Who will actually do the work, and who reviews it before it reaches us?
• Who do we call with a question, and what is a realistic response time?
• What happens to our file if that person leaves?

On delivery

• How many working days after a complete document set will we receive management accounts?
• Will we get a written deadline schedule for the year, or reminders as things fall due?
• How do you handle a year that is already behind?

On leaving

• If we appoint someone else in two years, what do we receive, in what format, and at what cost?
• Do we retain direct access to our own accounting data throughout the engagement?

The last two matter more than they appear. A firm that answers the handover question comfortably is a firm confident you will not be asking it. Ambiguity there — data held in a system you cannot access, files released only after a final invoice — is the single most reliable warning sign in this industry.