Stress Season: You’ve Gotta Commit.

Posted by Jim ShedivycloseAuthor: Jim Shedivy Name: Jim Shedivy
Email: jim@redmoonsolutions.com
Site: http://blog.redmoonsolutions.com
About: Jim focuses on the long term strategy and the alliance opportunities for Red Moon Solutions, a privately held family business. He has over twenty years of experience in managing tax technology projects and businesses.See Authors Posts (10) on Sep 16, 2010 | 0 comments

With less than one month until October 15th, it’s time to get serious about filing 2009 individual tax returns. Using today’s technology and easily sourced information, it’s certainly a lot easier to gather and organize information than it was 30 years ago…which reminds me of a funny story:

It should not be a huge surprise that my most memorable challenge in tax data collection was from the pre-cell phone or internet era.  In fact, it was even before I first used Lotus 1-2-3! My client, a large multinational, had a significant number of expatriates whose individual tax returns were to be prepared by us.  Most were relatively “normal” returns—and then there was Jerry’s.  Jerry was an energetic adventurer who’d happily retired during the prior year and was now fulfilling one of his ‘bucket list’ items…panning for gold.  In Chicken, Alaska.

As one can imagine, it was a logistical ‘opportunity’ to coordinate tax discussions and data collection at that time with Jerry—he being in Chicken and I in Milwaukee. I could call him at the local tavern once a month, when he was in Chicken stocking up on supplies. Remember, this was way before cell phones. It was our only option for going over his tax data and issues regarding his return. We religiously connected each month and successfully made the October deadline. The only memorable tax issue was determining when the gold Jerry had discovered became “income.”  After all, we had little experience with that issue in Wisconsin. It took a lot of commitment and even more patience, but it paid off!

Since you most likely do not have such interesting data collection ‘opportunities’ for filing, get your data pulled together and prepare your tax returns now. What extraordinary client tax preparation experience do you have to share? How have you ‘committed’ this Stress Season?

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