How to get rid of procrastinating tax clients

"Lemonhead" wrote

It depends.

No worries if you overpaid your taxes (ie: you are expecting a refund).

He could be, but I doubt it.

I would hope that your accountant sets priorities on his workload and handles it accordingly. You should call and ask where things stand, if you brought everything he needs, is there something missing, etc.

Then talk to him about the situation.

So many people come to accountants at the last minute after sitting on the paperwork for six months or more. If another client came to your accountant on 8 October and their work would take three weeks to complete why should the accountant complete your work first?

What I assume will have happened is that your accountant would have got about 20 or 30 clients arriving in the last week and each one would think the accountant would be sat there with nothing to do!

You shouldn't be asking who are the best accountants - you should be asking who are the worst clients and doing something about that!

"Peter Saxton" wrote

Yup. I had the highest number of "last minute" filers than ever. The elimination of the August 15th first extension date just deleted that first panic date when you can tell clients that "THIS IS IT!!!!!".

The number of people getting their extended returns done in August fell. They just waited all that much longer.

That's a relief! I'm not worried about it at all now, if that's the case. Thank you. How long do we have, exactly? (Yes, we did overpay again this year, by a fairly substantial amount. I am sure of that.)

Do you think this could trigger an audit? A friend tells me it might; i.e., the IRS could reason that here are two people who have a "big" refund yet got the maximum number of extensions and were still late filing... Something's not right here... Their return is not that complicated... Why don't they want their money back asap?... Let's audit them and find out what's going on.

Thanks for replying. I think you're correct about our CPA setting priorities. I'm sure he was swamped with work. Poor guy looked haggard when I saw him on 10/9. Apparently, I just waited too long this time...

"Lemonhead" wrote

What, filing late or having overpaid your taxes?

Neither will actually cause an audit. The "lateness" of your returns may give rise to some nastygrams from the IRS asking, then requesting, then demanding, that you file your returns, but generally not cause any audits. Neither will an overpayment.

What does cause audits would be the information ON the returns themselves. Like if you claimed that you didn't have any income, but refund all that tax that your employer withheld (yeah, there are some people that dumb).

Probably. Take him to lunch one day. Anyway, if his office was like mine, I had a record number of returns that were done in October than the past 15 Octobers.

And what do you want him to do? enroll them in Procrastinators Infamous? (since he made the effort to find them they could not possibly be anonymous anymore, could they?).