Category: Continuing Education

Becoming a specialist in any specific service offering, be it advisory, tax planning, tax resolution, or anything else, requires establishing a solid foundation of knowledge. Once you’ve established that foundation, you can then take deeper dives into specific subject areas to increase your technical competency in those areas.

To obtain that foundation, Tax Resolution Academy® is proud and delighted to announce our complete introductory tax resolution course arc is now available. This new curriculum, consisting a total of 7 hours of material, is now being presented in an ongoing rotation. Six of these tax resolution courses qualify for continuing education credit with the IRS for Enrolled Agents, NASBA for CPAs, and the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy specifically for CPAs in Texas.

We have called this basic tax resolution training program the Sweeping Overview series because each class provides exactly that: A sweeping overview of topics to help you learn more about what tax resolution actually is, what’s involved in the day-to-day client work, and broad concepts to help you evaluate tax debt cases for resolution. If you’ve ever taken a survey course in college, that would appropriately describe what we’re trying to achieve with this training program.

Since tax resolution encompasses quite a few sub-topics, we felt that this broad survey approach to teaching the basics was the appropriate way to present the foundational knowledge on which you can then build a successful career and highly profitable tax firm.

Tax Resolution Training Topics

The complete set of courses, broken into 1-hour webinars, is as follows:

• IRS Collections Representation: A Sweeping Overview (1 hour CE/CPE)
• IRS Collections Financial Analysis: A Sweeping Overview (1 hour CE/CPE)
• IRS Examination Representation: A Sweeping Overview (1 hour CE/CPE)
• Trust Fund Recovery Penalty: A Sweeping Overview (1 hour CE/CPE)
• Federal Tax Liens: A Sweeping Overview (1 hour CE/CPE)
• IRS Appeals: A Sweeping Overview (1 hour CE/CPE)
• The First $2500: 3 Tax Resolution Marketing Tactics to Find Your First Clients (1 hour, no CE/CPE)

To see the current schedule of classes, and register for upcoming sessions, visit our Eventbrite page:

https://www.eventbrite.com/o/live-tax-resolution-training-6598293989

What’s Covered in Each Class?

As you start your tax resolution training journey with us, you may want to know exactly what we’ll be covering.

To reiterate: These are basic, introductory level classes. They are intended mainly for those tax professionals that have very little prior exposure to IRS Collections and Examination case work. More than anything else, the … Continue reading

One of my favorite things about taxpayer representation is that it is a recession-proof business.

In fact, on the IRS Collections representation side of things, it’s a business that booms during a recession. Despite the ’07-’08 recession throwing me into bankruptcy, I was incredibly fortunate to then stumble into an industry that was poised to take off like a rocket.

In much the same way as back in 2008, small businesses today are suffering. Hundreds of thousands of small business owners are being forced to make painful decisions, right now, about what to do with their limited capital. Since they often fail to understand the long-term consequences, they frequently opt to stop paying their payroll taxes during times like this, to instead pay suppliers and employees. That’s just the reality of the situation for them to continue operating right now.

But, of course, today’s missed Federal Tax Deposit (FTD) is tomorrow’s Trust Fund Recovery Penalty (TFRP) assessment.

Most of the new 941 tax debt cases being created right now won’t really start being worked by SB/SE Collections until mid to late 2021. That’s just another reality of the current situation. By then, those tax debtors will have accumulated 4 to 6 quarters of 941 liability.

Are you going to be ready and able to represent such tax debtors next year?

To help you get started in this arena, on Dec. 10 at 10am PST I’ll be presenting the next installment in our Sweeping Overview series of CPE classes, covering the TFRP. This class will be a 1-hour, big picture overview of a variety of TFRP representation concepts. To create this class, I’m literally extracting specific slides from the PowerPoint decks that make up the much deeper 8-hour TFRP arc contained within our CTR™ curriculum. So, just like the rest of our Sweeping Overview courses, this class is exactly that: A sweeping overview of basic, high level concepts. These classes are really intended for those tax professionals that have zero prior exposure to the topic, but they’re also a good “knowledge check” class for experienced taxpayer representatives.

Course objectives for this class are:

• Recognize the role of the Trust Fund Recovery Penalty in the IRS Collection process.
• Describe the IRS trust fund investigation process.
• Identify the most common defenses against TFRP personal assessment.
• List the steps in the TFRP appeals process.

Registration for this class is only $10, and seating is limited to the … Continue reading

Step 1:  Marketing
Step 2:  ?
Step 3: Profit!

See, it’s sooo easy to build a profitable tax firm!

Of course, the devil is in the details.

For IRS Collection cases, there are a bunch of steps that need to be taken after a client hires you. The bulk of the work you do for the client is “front loaded” in the first two weeks. The generic progression of a tax resolution case looks like this:

1. Tax module research
2. Client financial analysis
3. Determine resolution options
4. Negotiate with the IRS
5. Go to Appeals (if necessary)
6. Seek penalty abatement (if applicable)
7. Withdraw or offer POA Monitoring

Those first three steps — that’s the bulk of the two weeks I just mentioned. But even those three steps can themselves be broken down into dozens of additional steps.

Collectively, I label this early part of a Collection engagement as the “Client Intake” phase. It includes everything from filing your 2848 with the CAF unit to verifying client contact info in your CRM system to making sure you get paid to requesting a Collection hold from the Service to requesting a Form 9297 from the Revenue Officer — and much, much more.

If you’re interested in getting into the weeds on these nitty-gritty details of client intake and early resolution steps, you’re invited to join me this coming Friday for a 2-hour CE/CPE webinar on this topic. When you attend, you’ll receive copies of my actual checklists for getting this all done and making sure I never missed an important step.

This class is CTR-104 in our ongoing CTR™ curriculum. Tax Resolution Academy® members can register for this class from the “Events” calendar inside the online community. But if you’re not an Academy member, you can still attend this individual class. Go here to register:

https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5538215188952001805

Here’s to efficiency via checklists,
~Jassen Bowman, EA, CTR™… Continue reading