Ellie Pope, BSc, Author at Think Outside the Tax Box

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT

Ellie Pope, BSc

Ellie Pope is the director of the Mastermind Program at the American Institute of Certified Tax Planners (AICTP), where she helps tax professionals add tax strategy to their practice, and successfully grow it into a substantial and repeatable revenue source.

She is also a business and executive coach with a private practice. She helps her clients reach their profit and lifestyle goals considerably faster, by working with them to keep their focus on their high-value opportunities, helping them escape their comfort zone without getting overwhelmed, and identifying short-cuts to the outcomes they want.

With her background in software engineering, Ellie’s experience includes designing satellite and telecom systems, managing cross-functional teams, and overseeing the full product lifecycle from definition to delivery. She also has extensive experience in somatic and transformational coaching. This gives her unique insight to support entrepreneurs in how to manage themselves, their people, and their process for powerful results.

Ellie has worked for giant companies like Qualcomm, Nortel and Alcatel. But her preferred calling is working with business owners who are dedicated to their own growth and development.

In her spare time, Ellie is an avid traveler, practices Feldenkrais and yoga, and loves the beach. She can often be found studying neurobiology, inner drive, and how to create optimal conditions for flow states, learning and growth.

Ellie can be reached at ellie@elliepope.com

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Should You Switch Your Work Strategy for Tax Planning Season?

If you’re like most tax professionals, you’re probably working tax-prep season hyper-focused and -vigilant, refusing to hit pause except on absolute demand. You’re keeping a sharp eye on the ball, the players, and the end goal: maximizing your resources and providing impeccable service to your clients. Now, when you have lots of familiar, practiced work to do in little time, working like this can produce great results.

However, tax-prep season is ending, and tax-reduction planning season is beginning. Therein, hyper-focus, hyper-vigilance, and workdays, weeks, and months without meaningful rest can backfire and steal from you the results you hope to produce. That’s because reactively responding to external demands and deadlines (set by clients and the IRS, for example), requires something different from you doing proactive designing and selling high-end tax plans.

Consider this, as you shift from tax-prep to tax planning, you:

● Soften your focus on computers, numbers, and speed and sharpen your focus on talking with prospective clients about their finances, their hopes and worries about their business and family, and how you might best serve them. This requires a shift from grinding and discipline to presence and attunement.
● Soften your focus on meeting immediate deliverables and sharpen your focus on developing long-term strategies for products you offer and your business overall. This requires a shift from following rules, structures, and guidance to thinking creatively and working socially.
● Soften your focus on external deadlines and client demands and sharpen your focus on your own ambitions and drive to get things done. This requires a shift from aligning your priorities with others’ agendas to aligning your priorities with your own dreams and goals.

Making shifts like these can be challenging, particularly if tax-prep season devours you and you enter tax-reduction planning season depleted and drained. However, taking time now to recharge and reset can help you pivot and produce powerful results in the end.

Did Tax Season Devour and Deplete You?

When it comes to personal performance in business, I like to contrast two modes of working: Depleted Mode and Resourced Mode. These modes aren’t binary; rather, they’re two ends of a continuum that we all constantly move along.

Generally, when you find yourself highly distracted and distractible, pushing yourself to keep going, and working excessive hours to make up for lost time, you’re in Depleted Mode. Tax-prep season unfailingly produces this outcome for the best of tax pros. Exhaustion (or simple tiredness), frustration, and a taxed mind (pun intended) live here.

When you’re drawn into your work, interested in the results you produce, and loving what you do, you’re in Resourced Mode. Enthusiasm, creativity, and connection live here. Resourced Mode offers an ideal environment to tax pros for engaging with the demands of tax planning season.

You’ve probably seen yourself operate in both of these modes and along the continuum. Many tax professionals start the tax-prep season in Resourced Mode but end in Depleted Mode after months of hyper-focus and -vigilance, both of which you can only sustain in short bursts. There’s nothing wrong with Depleted Mode; most people land themselves there through hard work and commitment. (Incidentally, you can build systems and structures to reduce or avoid Depletion Mode over time, but that’s a topic for another day.)

Many people produce great work in Depleted Mode, and that can trick them into thinking it’s effective for every kind of work. You can do tax prep in Depleted Mode, for example, because the work is familiar, somewhat predictable and consistent, and ultimately requires less mental engagement. However, Depleted Mode renders fewer productive results in tax-planning season because there you need deeper thought, mental space and physical energy to develop a strategy, a connection to people, and effectively sales.

Ultimately, even in situations where Depleted Mode works decently, Depleted Mode can lead to:

▪ Procrastination: Being overworked and under-rested drains your mental capacity and leads to internal resistance on projects that require more mental energy.
▪ Distractibility: Quick changes of focus habituate your brain to prioritize distractions instead of focused work, so you might find yourself putting “easy” work ahead of “valuable” work.
▪ Agitation: Fast pacing can create agitation, or a constant background sense of worry, which can hinder progress when you try to settle into something that requires deeper thinking, such as tax or business strategy (which requires divergent, non-linear thinking).
▪ Lower pay for more work: procrastination, distractibility, and agitation make it difficult to approach valuable work (higher-paying, more satisfying), leaving you to do easy work instead (lower-paying, less satisfying) so you feel as if you accomplish something.
▪ Cyclical depletion: In Depleted Mode, you produce less per hour, make up for it by working more hours, and stay in Depleted Mode by overworking yourself.

Still working in depleted mode? Click here to learn how to shut down the grind and turn on the productivity.

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CURRENT EDITION

Editor’s Pick: Tax Planner Faces Malpractice Claims Over Decades-Old Tax Advice—What Went Wrong?

Dominique Molina, CPA MST CTS

In a case that every tax professional should take note of, the prominent law firm Sidley Austin LLP finds itself defending against claims that it provided faulty tax advice over two decades ago, leading to massive IRS liabilities for a family. The plaintiffs, the Cáceres family, are seeking to recover $7 million after settling with the IRS, claiming Sidley’s advice on a complex asset liquidation set them up for disaster. The kicker? The lawsuit was filed over 25 years after the advice was given. So, how are the plaintiffs still able to pursue the case? It all boils down to a claim of fraud—and how that could toll the statute of limitations.

Navigating IRS Penalty Relief and Forgiveness

Timalyn Bowens, EA

Yes, the IRS does forgive some tax penalties. The IRS refers to this forgiveness as penalty abatement. Abatement is the act or process of reducing or removing something. In this case it is removing or reducing a penalty. But penalty forgiveness is not a blanket offer that everyone qualifies for the way the radio ads make it seem. There is a process that the IRS has for requesting and granting abatement. It is up to the taxpayer to prove that they qualify for abatement. That’s where you come in.

From The Government And Not There To Help You

Peter J Reilly CPA

The story of James J. Maggard has some interesting and possibly valuable lessons. The one that strikes me as particularly important is that it makes it crystal clear that disproportionate distributions contrary to a corporation’s governing documents will not blow its S election. That does not mean that disproportionate distributions are just fine and that you don’t need to address them. There is a practical lesson about being careful who you take on as fellow shareholders. And there is another slightly odd lesson, that almost makes me want to create a new law of tax planning: Don’t deliberately involve the IRS in your business disputes. Their job is not to help you.

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