-
Business Consulting
Our Consulting team guarantees quick turnarounds, lower partner-to-staff ratio than most and superior results delivered on a range of services.
-
Business Risk Services
Our Business Risk Services team deliver practical and pragmatic solutions that support clients in growing and protecting the inherent value of their businesses.
-
Corporate Finance
Our experienced Corporate Finance team has provided a range of transaction, valuation, deal advisory and restructuring services to clients for the past two decades.
-
Digital Risk
Our Digital Risk team offer advisory and consulting solutions that give our clients peace of mind, clear value for money and an enhanced ability to react to cyber attacks.
-
Digital Transformation
Our Digital Transformation team work with business leaders to deliver efficient digital strategies and operating models that provide new or enhanced capabilities.
-
Forensic Accounting
Our Forensic and Investigation Services team have targeted solutions to solve difficult challenges - making the difference between finding the truth or being left in the dark.
-
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a goal setting framework that helps teams, individuals and organisations set and track measurable goals.
-
People and Change Consulting
Our People & Change Consulting team help clients adapt to the changing nature of the workforce - how they attract, retain, engage, develop, deploy and lead their people.
-
Restructuring
Grant Thornton is Ireland’s leading provider of insolvency and corporate recovery solutions.
-
Outsourced Payroll
Our outsourced payroll teams become your dedicated payroll department, aiming to process your payroll in the most cost effective and compliant manner.
-
Outsourcing
Grant Thornton's reliable and cost-effective outsourcing services help you streamline your business operations by taking care of your workload.
-
Audit and Accounting Advisory
Our Audit and Accounting Advisory team takes the headache out of multi-jurisdictional audit compliance requirements as well as technical compliance with accounting standards and legislation for clients.
-
Business Process Outsourcing
Grant Thornton’s Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) team serves the needs of rapidly growing mid-tier multinationals operating out of Ireland and other hubs through the provision of services across the full range of finance functions.
-
Flexible People Solutions
At Grant Thornton, our Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS) department have a dedicated team that help finance functions maximise efficiency.
-
Global Compliance & Reporting Solutions
Our Global Compliance & Reporting Solutions service offering covers a full suite of compliance services including financial statement preparation and related filings, dual bookkeeping, direct and indirect tax, statistical returns and payroll.
-
Global Payroll Solutions
At Grant Thornton, we meet the challenges of our clients. Our Global payroll compliance service offering is tailored to meet all your payroll requirements through a single point of contact.
-
Actuarial
Our Actuarial team provides a comprehensive range of services to our insurance clients. From regulatory support for compliance to delivering specialist expertise in insurance & reinsurance.
-
Data Analytics
Our team helps to unlock the potential of data analytics within your organisation, allowing you to be more innovative, efficient and customer-centric than ever before.
-
Digital and Fintech
Our FinTech team are experts in technology and financial services and have a long track record of helping companies achieve sustained advantage.
-
Digital Risk
Our Digital Risk team offer advisory and consulting solutions that give our clients peace of mind, clear value for money and an enhanced ability to react to cyber attacks.
-
Financial Services Audit
Our Financial Services Audit team offers expertise and knowledge along with a horizontal approach to solving clients’ problems and queries.
-
Financial Services Consulting
We work closely with clients to understand their strategy and benchmark their performance against the very best international standards.
-
Financial Services Tax
Grant Thornton Ireland has a team of over 100 tax professionals providing advice to a diverse range of clients in the Financial Services sector.
-
FS Business Risk Services
Our FS Business Risk team have real experience of the financial services sector, through working within regulatory bodies or holding leadership positions in Risk, Compliance and Internal Audit functions.
-
Grant Thornton Pensioneer Trustees Limited
The Grant Thornton Pensioneer Trustee service can offer business owners, directors and employees the opportunity to manage their own retirement choices with full transparency.
-
Pension Audit
The Grant Thornton Pension Audit team has vast experience in managing schemes and preparing annual reports on them for clients.
-
Prudential Risk
Our industry leading Prudential Risk team works with clients on a range of areas including regulatory reporting, regulatory authorisations, on-site investigations and data quality assurance.
-
Quantitative Risk
Our Quantitative Risk team members bring a wide range of experience with many of them having backgrounds in banking, investment markets, regulation, professional practice, and academia.
-
Sustainability desk
We recognise that businesses are operating at different levels of maturity when it comes to sustainability, and pride ourselves on working with our clients to develop bespoke solutions to their needs.
-
Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS)
Our Financial Accounting and Advisory Services (FAAS) team designs and implements creative solutions for organisations expanding into new markets or undertaking functional financial transformations.
-
Grant Thornton Financial Counselling
Grant Thornton Financial Counselling (GTFC) comprises a team of highly qualified professionals who offer financial advice to individuals and corporates across a range of areas including savings, investments, pension planning, and inheritance and succession planning.
-
Inheritance Planning
Our services on Inheritance Planning mirror those on Succession Planning whereby the foundations of the plan are derived from meaningful conversations with those that wish to pass on or protect their asset base.
-
Personal Tax Compliance & Planning
The Grant Thornton Personal Tax team helps clients remain compliant and up to date with all of their tax obligations whilst ensuring that they are solutions driven and manage their finances in the most tax efficient way possible.
-
Succession Planning
We have extensive experience guiding our clients successfully through the succession process. This involves advice on both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the process. While there is a business at the core of each succession plan we advise on, it is all predicated on understanding the people and their respective wishes.
-
Company Secretarial
Grant Thornton’s Company Secretarial team contains qualified Company Secretaries. Clients are assured that they will meet all of their obligations under the Companies Acts and other relevant legislation and regulations.
-
Corporation Tax
Our Corporation Tax team is made up of more than 40 highly experienced senior partners and directors who work directly with a wide range of domestic, international, and financial services clients. We place a strong emphasis on direct service to clients and we pride ourselves on the close personal relationships we build and the deep understanding of their businesses we develop
-
Employer Solutions
Attracting and retaining key talent, managing employment costs and ensuring compliance with complex tax rules presents one of the most serious challenges today for many businesses. You need to ensure that your business complies with increasingly complex tax legislation and can adapt to updated Revenue guidance in a cost-effective way and we are here to help.
-
Financial Services Tax
The Grant Thornton team is made up of experts who are fully up to date in terms of changing and evolving tax legislation. This is combined with industry expertise and an in-depth knowledge of the evolving financial services regulatory landscape.
-
Global Mobility Services
Grant Thornton Ireland offer a different approach to managing global mobility. We have brought together specialists from our tax, global payroll, people and change and financial accounting teams across Ireland and Northern Ireland, while drawing on the knowledge and insights of our global network of over 143 offices of mobility professionals to provide you with a holistic approach to managing global mobility.
-
International Tax
We develop close relationships with clients in order to gain a deep understanding of their businesses to ensure they make the right operational decisions. The wrong decision on how a company sells into a new market or establishes a new subsidiary can have major tax implications.
-
Tax Advisory
The Grant Thornton Tax Advisory team blends commercial experience and knowledge with tax expertise to advise clients on the full range of transactions including sales, mergers, restructurings and succession planning.
-
Tax Incentives
Our Tax Incentives team help clients access vital cash funding and tax incentives to enable them to achieve their growth ambition.
-
Transfer Pricing
Our Transfer Pricing team has extensive experience across all industries. They can assist clients in overcoming challenges and deliver sector specific, sustainable solutions.
-
VAT
Grant Thornton’s team of indirect tax specialists helps a range of clients across a variety of sectors including pharmaceuticals, financial services, construction and property and food to navigate these complexities.
-
Real Estate Tax Advisory
The Irish real estate market has experienced considerable change in recent years. This has resulted in the emergence of a number of challenges for investors, but has also brought about significant opportunities. With this in mind, taxation is now more than ever one of the key factors for real estate investors when appraising investments, financing methods and development structuring.
Maximising your pension contributions: more than just tax relief
Oliver O'Connor
28 Oct 2021
It’s that time of year again. As income tax returns are filed, we keep seeing advertisements and notices telling us to top up our pensions and reduce our income tax liabilities. Yes, contributing to a pension is an effective way of reducing tax, but this is only one benefit of making a contribution.
When individuals are too focused on the tax relief obtained from their pension contributions, they lose focus on the other great benefit of pension funding; tax free investment growth. This is understandable. Tax relief is obtained in the short term and is seen as an immediate benefit, with the end goal of building a substantial retirement fund further down the road.
When it comes to investing your contributions, the level of returns on offer are historically correlated with the level of investment risk taken (provided you take a diversified approach to investing). To give an example, take the annualised, industry average investment growth of four different types of investment options over the past 15 years.
The expected level of return increases in line with each fund’s exposure to risk. In this case, the average Defensive Managed Fund would be expected to produce the lowest long term return, with the average Global Equity Fund expected to produce the highest long term return. This is indeed the case, with their respective 15-year average returns to 30 Sept 2021 detailed below.
Source: Longboat Analytics
Returns are gross figures, before management and advice fees have been taken into account.
Past performance does not guarantee future performance, the value of your investment can go down as well as up.
Example
To take this a step further, let’s assume Client A invested €25,000 into their pension 15 years ago, on 1 October 2006, and invested their full contribution in the average Defensive Managed Fund. Let’s also assume Client B invested the same amount on the same day, but was invested in the average Aggressively Managed Fund. Finally, let’s also assume both are paying annual management charges of 1.25% p.a. to cover the cost of the investments and the advice received.
Both clients would have obtained the same amount of tax relief (€10,000 using today’s marginal rate of 40%). However, after 15 years of tax free investment growth, their respective values would be as follows:
Client A - €33,696.22
Client B - €49,505.22
Both clients saw the benefit of €10,000 tax relief, but Client B is now almost 47% better off than Client A. Of course, Client A may not have been willing to take more risk than they did, and that is perfectly fine. It is important to fully understand the risk involved in any investment.
The reason this is so important to highlight is that too many people see their October/November pension contribution as a tax saving exercise, and not an investment decision. For the likes of self-employed individuals who contribute to a personal pension plan every year, this is extremely important. If you don’t identify an appropriate investment strategy early, you are potentially losing out on significant gains in your overall retirement funding long term.
How do you know what is right for you?
When it comes to pension funding, you are essentially planning for your future retirement. However, there is a lot more to consider than just your pension by the time that day comes around.
Over the course of your working life, you will have various assets, liabilities, incomes and expenditures. Trying to figure out how they fit into the bigger picture is difficult, and without proper analysis you may make poor financial decisions.
The best way to manage this is to create a personal financial plan, and the sooner this is done the better. It allows you to see your future financial needs, quantify them, and plan for them. Without it, planning for retirement is just a guessing game.
If you plan on making a pension contribution before the income tax filing deadline, now may be the time to look at the bigger picture and ask yourself what you need your money to do for you.
See our Private Client Services offering
