My 40th Tax Season

Now that April 18 is almost gone, this marks my 40th official tax season. My first tax season was with a small CPA firm in downtown Seattle while I was attending my last year of school at the University of Washington.

I had gotten married the summer before and my wife would drive me downtown after school. I still remember the first partnership tax return that I prepared. The CPA handed it to me and told me to work up the return which had to be writing by hand and I have horrible hand writing.

I was so proud to hand it to him when I finished it just to get deflated when he asked me “where’s the workpapers”. All I did was prepare the return. He had forgotten to tell me that I needed to have workpapers. Of course many staff probably still say “where’s my workpapers” since I seem to keep more in my head than on paper sometimes.

Some of the other memorable tax season experiences are as follows:

• The space shuttle Challenger crash. That was in January 1986 and I still remember vividly being in the conference room at our office watching the event over and over. Needless to say there was not much work done that day.
• Basketball at state during my oldest son’s junior and senior year. My sons went to a small private school and the first time they went to state was during his junior year. It was in Spokane at the arena and at the first game you could tell that this was a new experience since the score was 20-2 the other team leading before my son got into the game after about five minutes. He did not seem to rattled since he scored about 12 points before half-time. They lost that game but ended up getting fifth place that year. His senior year they were at state again and did not place but he got voted 2nd team all-state so that was fun too.
• COVID tax seasons. I call the 2020-2022 tax seasons as being one big COVID tax season. It seems it never ended and I am hoping that all of our staff and others who prepare tax returns are able to get somewhat back to normal this year since it has been a long-time since any normalcy.

Being a traditional CPA, I will be golfing on Tuesday (and Wednesday and Friday). I head to Colorado on Friday and will fly to Frankfurt, Germany Saturday afternoon to meet up with my son for our two week trip in Europe. I will try to do some posts when I am there on my iPad. I am leaving the computer home and trying to leave the emails alone (but I know I won’t succeed totally).

I hope everyone had a good tax season and many of you will see many more.