Questions I actually get asked

It is a flat fee, quoted in writing before any work starts, and the number comes out of a complexity score rather than my read of you. At intake I count the things that actually drive the work: income sources, states filed, schedules and forms required, entities involved, transaction volume, foreign accounts, and whether prior years need cleanup. The same inputs produce the same price for any client. Most firms bill hourly, set a fee based on what they think the work is worth to you, or estimate a flat fee by feel. Mine is a flat fee set by formula, which is why a question in June costs you nothing.

It can move in either direction, but only against the same scale, and never because the work took me longer than I planned. If a K-1 turns up that nobody mentioned at intake, or you sold a rental in March, the complexity is genuinely higher and the price follows. If your situation is simpler than you described it, the price comes down. You see the reason before you see the revised number.

Three things, and an invoice is a bad place to meet them for the first time. Prior-year cleanup, meaning amending a return I didn't prepare or rebuilding books that don't tie to anything, is scoped and quoted separately. Unfiled years are priced per year rather than folded into the current one. Representation in an actual examination is its own engagement under a Form 2848 power of attorney. All three get a written number before I start.

Nothing, and there is no obligation at the end of it. Part of what you get out of it is a straight answer about whether paying anyone is worth it. If your return is a single W-2 and the standard deduction, which is $15,750 for a single filer in 2025, consumer software handles that correctly and you should keep your money.

Yes, and most of the work already runs that way. Two things make it legitimate. Practice before the IRS is federal, so a CPA can prepare federal returns and represent taxpayers before the IRS regardless of which state issued the license. Separately, CPA mobility, sometimes called substantial equivalency, lets a licensed CPA work across state lines. Distance has almost no practical effect on a return that arrives as documents anyway.

Multi-state filing is routine here. Engineers on project work and physicians picking up locum shifts regularly file three or four states in a year. The part worth knowing in advance: your resident state gives you a credit for tax paid to a nonresident state, but if your home rate is lower the credit does not make you whole, and each additional return raises the complexity score. If your situation involves a local or city filing regime I don't work in, you hear that at intake, not in April.

Less than people assume, and something specific. I am not your attorney and I don't give legal advice. What the JD changes is where I read: the Code section, the regulation, the case, instead of somebody's summary of a summary. That matters for reasonable-compensation positions, entity structure, and notice responses, where the real question is what authority supports the position and how it holds if someone pushes back. On a straightforward W-2 return it changes nothing.

Through Tax Nucleus, the client portal, not email. Files live in folders organized by tax year, with PDF preview and a record of who uploaded what and when, so did you get my 1099 has an answer you can check yourself. Each return runs through five visible steps, from engagement letter to questionnaire to open questions to reviewing and signing the return to the invoice, with a progress bar showing where you are. An email inbox is the wrong place for a W-2 and a Social Security number. The public client login is being finalized now; until it opens, clients coordinate through the contact form.

Because a published number and address get scraped within days, and then you are handling calls about merchant cash advances and ERC mills. The contact form is the front door, and it reaches me directly rather than a queue. In the two weeks before a major deadline replies get shorter, not slower. If an answer needs research rather than a reply, you hear that first instead of hearing nothing.

Yes, and that is the half of the year where the money is. A return filed in April reports decisions you already made. Retirement plan selection, salary and entity structure, the timing of a sale, whether to make a state pass-through election, all of that has to happen before December 31. There is no hourly clock, so nothing is running when you call in August.

Send it to me, don't ignore it, and don't pay it just because it states a number. Most letters are not audits. The common one is a CP2000, generated when the automated matching program sees a 1099 or broker statement that doesn't line up with the return, and many of those have a short answer: a 1099-K or 1099-NEC reporting gross receipts while your books recorded the deposit net of processing fees. The response deadline printed on the notice is real, usually 30 days, and missing it moves the proposal along to a statutory notice of deficiency, which starts a hard 90-day clock to petition the Tax Court. That clock is set by statute and nobody can extend it. Let the 90 days run out and the tax is assessed. Under a Form 2848 I can deal with the IRS directly instead of coaching you through the call.

Both, and they work better together, because the return is only as good as the books behind it and January cleanup is the most expensive kind. That said, if you already have a bookkeeper doing careful work, keep them. I would rather review a clean QuickBooks file each quarter and catch the coding problems that become a Schedule C mismatch than take over the data entry.

For a refund, generally three years from when the return was filed or two years from when the tax was paid, whichever is later. After that window a Form 1040-X can still correct the record, it just cannot recover money. Fixing an understatement has no such limit, and there is a reason to do it voluntarily: the assessment period stretches to six years when income is understated by more than 25 percent, and it never closes at all on a return that was never filed.

Yes. This is more common than people think, and it usually starts with one hard year rather than anything dramatic. The clock is the thing to understand. The assessment period never starts on a return you never filed, so the exposure does not age out on its own. I pull IRS wage and income transcripts to reconstruct what was reported about you, file the open years, then deal with the balance. Filing your own return also beats the substitute return the IRS will eventually prepare for you, which allows no deductions and the least favorable filing status available.

You don't need a reason and you don't owe anyone an explanation. Ask for the last three years as filed plus the working papers that carry forward: the depreciation schedule, Form 7203 basis if you are an S-corp shareholder, capital loss and net operating loss carryforwards, passive activity carryovers on Form 8582, state pass-through election history, and any Form 3115 filed. If there is a fee dispute, Circular 230 section 10.28(a) is worth quoting, since a dispute over fees generally does not relieve a practitioner of the responsibility to return your records. Send me what you have and I will tell you what is missing.