“Tax Day” is finally here!

If you specialize in something other than tax return preparation, then today is just another day for you.

But if a significant portion of your annual income is derived from return preparation, then today is obviously a momentous day.

You’ve endured the long days and even longer weekends. The cranky clients, the slow-payers, the procrastinators.

Today is when everything gets tidied and up with a pretty little bow on top and sent off to our Uncle Sam, for tomorrow we party!

Or, at least that’s the fantasy world that the general public believes we live in.

You and I know that’s not really the case.

You have a pile of extensions. You have bookkeeping to catch up on. And every month we have FTD deadlines and other various filing deadlines, through every month of the year.

Which brings me to my main point for you today: If you’re in private practice or at a small firm, and are looking to absolutely maximize annual revenue, then the best thing you can do is maintain the intensity and productivity of tax preparation season all year round.

If you’ve ever worked at a really large firm, or a specialized, niche type of firm, then you know this is how they operate. Tax prep season is nothing special — it’s a just a minor extra blip in the year.

I know you want to relax, soak up some sun, maybe throw back some margaritas. And a little bit of that is good. But now is not the time to rest on your laurels.

As you probably know already, I spent the past 8 years as a one-trick pony, doing mostly IRS Collections representation. No bookkeeping, very little tax preparation, no Examination representation. Even more, I specialized in a narrow arena of Collections representation: 2290 and 941 liabilities for mom and pop trucking companies in five western states.

I did this work year-round, including for over 3 years at reduced yet steady volume while traveling 100% of the time.

More important than the niche specialization was the fact that I had no seasonal mentality about my business.

There are “riches in niches”, but the year-round consistency was a far more important factor for me having my dream lifestyle and a great tax practice.

So even though “Tax Day” is here, I want to encourage you to keep on truckin’. Be that one person in your local market that keeps charging … Continue reading

#6 End of Tax Prep Season

Welcome to this end-of-season special episode of 230 Insider!

230 Insider provides news, insight, and analysis for Circular 230 practitioners to help you build a better tax firm. We provide information specifically for those tax professionals that practice under the auspices of IRS Circular 230, including regulatory updates and tax firm marketing strategies.

Please leave us a review on iTunes, and feel free to leave us comments for this episode below. We welcome your feedback, story suggestions, and are openly looking for show guests to discuss interesting representation cases, tax practice anecdotes, and marketing strategies.… Continue reading

IRS Releases 2015 Collections Data

Today brings one of my absolute favorite days of the year: The release of the annual IRS Data Book for the preceding fiscal year.

As always, I jump directly to the most precious tidbit in the entire data book: Table 16. If you’re not familiar, this is the table that summarizes IRS Collections enforcement activities for the year.

This year’s table illustrates two key things that are important for you to know from a tax resolution marketing standpoint.

First, the number of open Collections cases continues to increase. FY15 saw a net increase of 961,000 open Collections cases in inventory. As of the end of the fiscal year in September, there were 13.3 million active Collections cases. That means increased tax resolution opportunities for you.

Second, the number of new tax lien filings continues to decrease, a trend we’ve seen continuously for a number of years. In FY15, the IRS filed over 30,000 *fewer* new NTFLs than in FY14. This trend has progressively made tax lien marketing more difficult, in terms of the “low hanging fruit” and decreasing response rates. This means that, while tax lien marketing is getting progressively more difficult every year, you should be getting higher quality clients from the tax lien marketing you are doing. Be more selective, as the IRS obviously is when it comes to filing the liens. Also, you really should be shifting more of your marketing budget to digital marketing.

It should also be noted that levy activity dropped by about a quarter, despite the fact that monies collected actually went up by about $1.3 billion.

Another thing that’s obvious from this year’s report is that the IRS crackdown on unfiled returns is paying off. FY15 ended with almost half a million fewer open delinquent return investigations than in ’14, and the number of new investigations was also substantially lower. I think this tells us that the IRS is relying more on computerized data matching to help close out delinquent return investigations, and those systems are working.

The Offer in Compromise program never has been and never will be your primary tax resolution tool, but practitioners are inevitably curious about it, so I’ll make a brief mention about it here. The number of offers received and accepted didn’t really change (it hardly ever does year to year). However, the amount of revenue collected by the government through the OIC program went up about 14%.… Continue reading