Problem with accountant

Accountant is threatening to shop me to the Inland Revenue unless I settle his bill

Dear Sir,

I've had a problem with my accountant over the past year being late in completing my PAYE and payslips, and not completing them in the correct way, so I told him that I was going to get rid of him and have refused to pay for the incorrectly calculated PAYE.

I've also pointed out to him that he's incorrectly produced the company accounts. I can see that the turnover and depreciation/capital allowance figures are wrong and I'm very suspicious that the books have just been made to balance by adding extra expenses and putting an "other creditors" section in the list of creditors liable within a year.

Unfortunately, since no accountant ever provides full paperwork as to how they produced the accounts, this isn't the first mystery set of accounts that I've looked at.

Anyway, having discovered that my accountant has been less than industrious in researching my paperwork, he's using this as a basis to threaten me with an IR investigation.

What can I do? Now that I've realised that a lot of accountants aren't doing the paperwork as meticulously as I'd expected, I've now realised that if the IR come knocking it's me and not the accountant who's liable. This is an utter disgrace. In other countries, it's the accountant who's liable. How come I have to pay exorbitant fees for complex work, which I shouldn't have to understand, and for which I can't get any compensation if the work has actually been carried out by a cowboy? There must be some means of recompense, surely?