As you are in the heat of another tax season, probably without enough help, you don’t have time to study legislation especially proposed legislation prospectively effective in 2025 that is extremely unlikely to pass. But you may have clients or friends or relatives who expect you to know about this sort of thing. Fortunately, you have me who retired from active practice right at the end of 2018 and has time for this sort of nonsense. So here is more than you need to know about the proposed Fair Tax Act of 2023.
Small Mistakes With Huge Costs for Your Client’s Tax Returns
Joshua Youngblood, EA, CTRS, CRETS, NTPI Fellow
We’ve all been there. A client walks into your office and, somewhere in the conversation, you realize that a seemingly minor oversight, a missed deadline, a form nobody filed, an election nobody mentioned, has spiraled into a five- or six-figure tax problem. In my years of practice, some of the most expensive mistakes I’ve seen weren’t the result of aggressive planning gone wrong. They were small, quiet errors. The kind that happens when a deadline slips, an election isn’t made, or a form gets overlooked entirely. The tax code is unforgiving in these situations, and the IRS has little sympathy for “I didn’t know.” This article walks through some of the most common, and most costly, small mistakes that can devastate your client’s tax situation, along with practical guidance for avoiding them.
