Try This Clean Slate Exercise

Clean slate with three pieces of colored chalk

Spend a few minutes today to check your course.

By Ed Mendlowitz
Tax Season Opportunity Guide

We all get caught up with what we do. Sometimes so much that we lose sight of what we are doing and the purpose.

MORE ON TAX SEASON: Offer Your Tax Clients Other Services | Can Your Tax Reviewers Answer These 10 Questions? | The Top 12 Mistakes in Tax Return Preparation | Six Types of Person: Which Are You? | Answer These Two Questions First | Help Your Tax Clients, Help Yourself | What’s Your Value to Your Tax Clients? | Are You Excited About Tax Season?
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Also, work happens. Many of us start out with lofty plans that go astray as the practice develops. Many things cause it – clients we get, availability or lack of availability of the right staff, how we choose to learn or not learn new things, and even where we locate.
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Tax Chat: Eric Green Reveals The Tax Rep Guide to Tax Season

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Seth Fineberg
With Eric Green

Renowned tax attorney Eric L. Green delivers a roadmap for seizing tax resolution opportunities this tax season in the new video from last week’s first Tax Chat of the year, hosted by Seth Fineberg.

MORE TAX SEASON: FTC Nails TurboTax for ‘Free Filing’ Scam | | Offer Your Tax Clients Other ServicesHigher Fees to Start: Ten Ways to Make Your Tax Season Better | Tax Pros Handle 37.7% of E-filings | If Only the IRS’s Tax Pro Were UsefulCan Your Tax Reviewers Answer These 10 Questions? | Tax Pros File 33% of Early Returns | Can’t IRS Online Accounts Be More Useful?

In this live webinar, attendees – and now you – get the fundamentals for catching lucrative tax rep engagements without adding to busy season workloads. With live, real-time Q&A, everyone’s questions got answered.
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Refunds Up as Tax Pros Tackle 41.5% of E-filings

* Total refunds issued represent returns received and processed in 2024 – the current year only. The number of direct deposit refunds represents returns received in the current and prior year but processed in 2024.

Also: The IRS realizes a footnote is in order and we are shocked.

By Beth Bellor

Average tax refunds are on the rise, so the weekly filing data has one uptick besides the amount of traffic to the IRS website – an increase that perhaps isn’t a positive.

MORE: Tax Pros Handle 37.7% of E-filings | Tax Pros File 33% of Early Returns
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The Internal Revenue Service had received 34.7 million returns, down 5.7 percent from the same period one year ago, as of the week ending Feb. 16, the latest data available. Lower numbers are no surprise, of course, because there had been only 19 days in the 2024 filing season, which opened Jan. 29, compared to the 26 days there had been in the 2023 season, which opened Jan. 23.
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FTC Nails TurboTax for ‘Free Filing’ Scam

shocked couple looking at laptop while sitting on couch

What does ‘free’ mean? It shouldn’t be up for debate.

By CPA Trendlines Research

American taxpayers are all victims of a tax scam.

Yes, all of them.

MORE: If Only the IRS’s Tax Pro Were Useful | Tax Pros File 33% of Early Returns | The Nightmare of Non-credentialed Tax Preparers | Must the IRS Be a Dark Hole? | IRS Plays Whac-A-Mole with the Phones | VCs Plunk $60 Million into AI-Powered ‘Autonomous’ Tax Prep
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And the New York Times points an accusatory finger straight at TurboTax.

A Tax Season Villain

In a 15-minute video article by John Harris and Binyamin Appelbaum, the Times says there’s a tax villain, and it’s neither the tax rate nor the Internal Revenue Service.
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