A man with a Ratoath address who commissioned an Ashbourne-based accountant to deal with certain accounts claimed at Navan District Court that the accountant had failed in his duty to him in looking after a company that he had just incorporated. He said he had paid €4,500 in fees to the accountant. Gerard Healy, Bodeen Lane, Ratoath, trading as Remote Ireland Tours sued Monahan and Co, Ashbourne Shopping Centre for €2,000.
He said he had now ceased trading as a limited company and this had caused him financial loss. John Monahan of Monahan and Co denied the claims in his office. Mr Healy told the court that he had been referred to the Monahan company by the Money Advice and Budgeting Service (MABS) and they had a long chat in the Monahan office about “everything, people we knew in common and stuff, a long, long conversation”.
He had told him he was a sole trader and was doing his own accounts, and was perfectly capable of doing them but that he had incorporated a new company a few months prior and would need someone to look after the accounts. “We agreed that he would look after my limited company”. They had no written agreement. “That’s why I needed an accountant, it’s not my area”.
When leaving the Monahan office that day he understood Mr Monahan would look after MABS and look after his limited company. He had paid him for the first set of accounts “but my mistake, I thought he was doing them for the limited company but he was doing them for the trading company. I assumed he was doing them for the limited company”.
Judge Eirinn McKiernan asked Mr Healy if he had not had it in writing what Mr Monahan was doing for him and he replied “No, I didn’t, look I work on my own. I don’t have an office or secretary”. He discovered the accounts hadn’t been done when he got a letter from the Revenue last year stating the accounts had not been filed.
Mr Monahan said in evidence that he had met Mr Healy to discuss his mortgage, “nothing else, and that’s all I talked to him about”. Mr Monahan said he had written to MABS and they had replied a month later instructing him to do “my level best”. He was to work with Mr Healy to help sort his mortgage out. They had not discussed a limited company – “I didn’t even know it existed”, Mr Monahan said. In a document prepared by MABS there was no mention of the limited company, no mention of Mr Healy’s car accident, no mention of an inheritance he got from his mother, no mention of Irish Life money that he had got. Mr Healy had no accounts done.
Mr Monahan said he had written to Pepper Finance about Mr Healy’s situation and they had sent him a form which he had forwarded to Mr Healy. “I never got it back”, he said. “Bear in mind, he had 178 payments he had never made to Pepper and I’m caught in the mincer”.
Mr Monahan said he had never known about a company named Remote Ireland Tours. Mr Healy contested that, saying that he did know.
Brendan Gavin, MABS gave evidence that Mr Healy had come to the MABS office in October 2022. At that time he did not know the name of Mr Healy’s company. He knew Mr Healy was self-employed and knew that he had set up a company or was in process of setting it up.
Mr Monahan invited the judge to look at the invoices where she would see that they were all for “personal work”. He added that he knew “nothing about Remote Ireland Tours”.
Judge McKiernan said that having listened to all the evidence she was going to award a decree for €1,500 against Mr Monahan.
