50 YEARS OF PREPARING 1040s – HOW IT ALL BEGAN

My first encounter with income taxes came when I was a freshman in college.  I had taken the first half of Accounting 101, but had not taken any tax classes.  I had no experience with or education in any aspect of income taxes.  I had never even prepared my own simple returns. 
 
On February 12, 1972, my Uncle Ted, my father’s older brother, did what he did every Lincoln’s Birthday.  He went to the storefront office of James P Gill on Sip Avenue, just off Journal Square, where the Jersey Bounce began, in Jersey City to have his tax return prepared.  While there he told Jim that I, a freshman Business Management major at St Peter’s College, had completed the basic Accounting course and was helping him keep the books for the non-profit pre-school he ran. 
 
Jim, or JP as was known, hired college students during the tax season as “apprentice” preparers.  He told my uncle to send me in to see about a job.
 
On my initial visit to Jim’s office he took me to a desk, gave me a copy of a client’s previous year’s tax return and a briefcase full of papers that constituted the current year’s tax “stuff”, and told me to “jump in and swim”.
 
Jim preferred hiring apprentices with no prior tax education, training or experience – so we could learn practical tax return preparation in the “real world” and not the classroom.
 
If I had a question, I would ask JP, who would take the time to explain the answer or send me to find the answer in his CCH tax library.   So, I was self-taught via on-the-job training.  I learned how to prepare income tax returns in the very best way possible – by preparing income tax returns.  Back then there was no software – so I learned by preparing returns manually.  I firmly believe the best way to learn how to prepare returns is by preparing them manually.   
 
In the mid-1980s Jim moved his office to Newark Avenue, one block from the County Courthouse.  While I had begun my own tax and accounting practice by then I continued to work for Jim on week-ends and full-time for the last two weeks of the season.
 
At the beginning of the 1999 tax-filing season some of Jim’s clients, who knew me and how to contact me, told me that his office was locked and they could not reach him at the office phone.  I went to his home in Hoboken and he told me, “I’m 75.  I don’t want to do this anymore.”  He gave me the practice and his office lease in exchange for my paying the few months back rent he owede.  For that first year I worked out of two offices, Jim’s in Jersey City and mine in Union.  When the season was over, I gave up my Union office and settled into Newark Avenue. 
 
Rolls were reversed, as JP would come and help me out during the last weeks of the season.  In 2001 Jim went to his final audit. We had worked together just one year short of 30 tax seasons.     
 
In my 50 tax seasons I have never prepared a 1040, or any other federal income tax return, using flawed and expensive commercial tax preparation software.  When asked what software I use I simply say “my brain”.  I am truly the last of the dinosaurs, one of a handful, if not the only, tax professional who still prepares all my 1040s manually.
 
The closest I came to using software was during my brief tenure as a “para-professional” for the Small Business Department of then big-eight CPA firm of Deloitte Haskins + Sells back in the late 1970s.  I would fill-in an “input sheet” for a Form 1040 and give it to our department’s secretary, who would enter the information in a computer and generate a return using Computax.  My reaction back then was that by the time I finished filling in the input sheet I could have actually prepared the return manually.
 
At a CPE session in San Antonio many years ago, conducted by legendary veteran tax pro and former director of the IRS Office of National Public Liaison (a division of the agency that serves as a link to tax professionals, business associations, taxpayer assistance groups, and federal agencies) Beanna Whitlock, she asked the participants if anyone still prepared 1040s manually.  Of course, my hand was the only one that went up.  Beanna said she wanted to shake my hand - because I was the only one in the room who really knew how to prepare 1040s!
 
I actually worked with a computer geek friend to create a tax software program, which went nowhere, back in the early 1980s.  It did not generate an actual Form 1040, but would verify the tax liability that was calculated on a manual return by entering key information and numbers from the 1040.  We called it the Tax Return Verification System.
 
I doubt if I thought back in February of 1972 that preparing tax returns would become my career.  But here I am 50 tax seasons later.  

TTFN

 

TTFN