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Advice for Tax Preparers

Making tax preparers lives easier one blog at a time

The Definition of a Secret in a Public Accounting Firm Tax Department

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I could not find who originally said it. But the following quote is one that I heard from a management consultant friend of mine on a regular basis. He said the definition of a secret is

“merely information that is passed one person at a time”.

His point was that any information you give or action you take in front of anyone at the firm is at risk of being communicated to another person in the firm. It does not matter if the information is personal or professional or if the information was given accidentally or on purpose.

Therefore, you should keep to yourself anything that you do not want the partner group to know.

Breaking the Rules

I know that you are going to break the rule I just noted to you. All of us do it at one time or another. We form friendships with our coworkers and we want to talk with them about our personal and professional lives.

But keep in mind that every time you do it,  you need to consider the following questions: [click to keep reading…]

Tax Preparers: Learn about Four Professions that Create Problem Clients for CPA firms.

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Man Eating PC Tax accountants might work with numbers, but we are in a people business. You will run into good and bad clients in all professions. But the following professions tend to cause CPA firms more grief on average than others. If you are assigned a client in one of these area then look at the prior year files to see if the client tends to cause a problem for the firm. [click to keep reading…]

Accounting Majors: The Three Tax Books Used by CPA Firms Every Day that Colleges Do Not Give You

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College tax textbooks do provide good information. But they are rarely used in a public accounting firm’s tax department. The reason is that these books are usually designed to discuss basic tax theory rather than to discuss the day-to-day items that you will run into in a typical public accounting tax practice. Therefore, a tax textbook has the luxury of spending several chapters discussing tax reorganizations even if you might not see one for the first several years of your career (if at all).

But in the real world, you want practical tax information that is easily accessed. You want to know what specific types of medical expenses are deductible on Form 1040 Schedule A or real estate expenses on Form 1040 Schedule E. Yes, there are times when you want to research a difficult topics. But on most occasions, the issue of whether an item is deductible or includible in income has already been decided. You only need to find the answer (in plain easy to read English).

As a result, there are three tax books that have been created to solve this problem that are used daily in a public accounting firm’s tax department.  [click to keep reading…]

Assigning & Accepting Blame in a Public Accounting Firm’s Tax Department

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assign blame dog 450 Since I did my previous post on learning how to accept praise, I thought it was worth sharing how most tax departments decide who is at fault for an internal problem before looking at who actually did anything wrong. Although tax accountants tend to be very law and order oriented (its one of the reasons we don’t get selected for jury duty), we hate to get blamed for doing something wrong. [click to keep reading…]