Advice on ACCA F6 (Taxation)

For those who are planning to take their ACCA F6 tax exam this coming June, this blog is aimed at giving you some advice and pointers on your upcoming exam.

Lots of Little Mistakes

          When I took my tax exam last December having worked hard on learning the difficult stuff I found that my main area of weakness was that I kept making lots of little mistakes as I went along. Each of these mistakes on their own won't cause you to fail but they can soon build up and hamper your eventual performance. In addition, even if you do spot this mistake in the exam, they can can end up taking up alot of your exam time to correct depending on what stage of the exam you spot them and how many of your calculations you're going to have to redo.

Time

          Another issue I found was that of time. In my exam, due to making the little mistakes as mentioned above, I failed to leave enough time to finish the exam. As such, out of the exam's five questions I ended up leaving the last question (question 5) out completely and rushing the one before that (Question 4). This wasn't my best move and I wouldn't recommend anyone else doing the same.

          Saying that, as the first two questions of the exam are worth 50-60 percent of the marks on their own (enough for you to pass), it is natural that these two should take up more of your time than the exam's other questions. However, it is unlikely that you'll answer these questions well enough for you to pass simply relying on them. So use these two questions to get you the bulk of your marks while using the rest of the exam questions to push you over the edge and get you that pass you need.

Plan

          As there is a chance you may not be able to finish all the exam's questions, you have to plan and prioritise which order you want to do questions in in a way that gives you the best chance of success. This would normally involve doing the exam's first two questions first to give you the bulk of your marks and then plan the remainder of your questions so you attempt the ones your are most confident in first. There is no point spending loads of time on a question you know you cannot do well only to leave too little time to finish a question in which you know you can score well in. This will harm your chances of passing potentially leading you to wasting a tonne of time and money on exam fees and tuition. I know many people will read that and would want to at least attempt all the questions in the exam and there is no reason you can't do that, but just attempt the questions you are more confident in first and then go to the questions you are less confident in towards the end.

Topic by Topic

          Now I'll briefly go over the topics included in the exam one by one.

Corporation & Income Tax (25-30 marks each, 50-60 marks in total)

          As I said before, these two questions will give you the bulk of your marks and thus you should focus on these two types of tax more than the others. The examiners will tell you the main rates of tax and their associated bands in the paper so you don't have to worry about memorising them. However, you do need to learn how to use them and the focus of your studies will be on learning what is included as income and to what extent, what rate of tax applies for each type of income and what is excluded from tax altogether. Another thing you will have to learn is how these rates of tax change when dealing with income that lies in between the different tax bands. (This mainly applies to corporation tax.) These aren't necessarily hard to learn if you put the effort in and like I said before, your main difficulty here will be trying to avoid making unnecessary mistakes as you go along.

VAT, Inheritance & Capital Gains Tax (10-20 marks each, 40-50 marks in total)

          These other taxes will form the basis of the smaller questions in the exam paper generally having one question per tax. Personally I found inheritance tax the easiest to learn and calculate out of all the taxes but one of the more time consuming to actually do. The main issues I found difficult here is learning all the relevant filling and due dates when it came to paying VAT and capital gains tax. Another thing I found difficult was the treatment of shares and how the valuation of those shares were actually calculated. I quite easily learnt and understood the main way of costing these shares but what made it complicated is memorising all the other ways and knowing when to use them.

          Well I hope this blog post helps those who are planning to take their tax exam this coming year even if it's just a little bit. One last bit of advice, after the exam you will likely think you have failed and worrying yourself needlessly. Once you have left that exam hall there is nothing you can do so just forget about it until it comes to results day and then deal with it then. The only way to avoid failure is by working long and hard before the exam as that's the only time you can actually do something about it. Then when it comes to the exam itself just relax and remember what you have learnt, pace yourself and give yourself plenty of time.

Good luck and all the best,

Jason