IRS Practice Series: Curing the Addicted Tax Delinquent - A 12-Step Program (Currently Unavailable)

Author: Eva Rosenberg

Some clients are chronically in tax trouble. While this might be lucrative for tax professionals, it is devastating to your client, his or her family — and even to you, if you care (which you do!) This course will help you guide your clients to develop good tax and business habits — and perhaps even save their marriages and more. This topic is the eleventh course in the IRS Practice Series.

Publication Date: August 2015

Designed For
Any proactive, current or prospective, Circular 230 practitioner that understands the IRS is ramping up the "close the tax gap". Tax practitioners who want to protect their existing clients from IRS' predatory collections action — and from clients' own insecurities and personal failures. And tax practitioners who want to grow their business into this rapidly expanding market. Note: Those who have earned the Tax Mediary (CTM) Certificate, will earn the Tax Mediary (CTM) Certificate — Intermediate Level upon completion of the full series.

Topics Covered

• Understanding the causes of tax delinquency
• Recognizing clients who are apt to develop a pattern of non-filing or non-paying
• Setting up procedures to help your clients develop good habits
• Knowing which clients to simply reject
• 12-step program to help your clients overcome their tax fears

Learning Objectives

• Identify the tools to recognize a chronic tax offender — and to cure them
• Recognize how to expand a tax practitioners practice base to include client training
• Differentiate the characteristics of the flippant tax delinquent
• Describe the 12-step program involving making a tax plan
• Identify the best way to convey the fees to the client when to prepare an engagement letter with an included fee structure
• Recognize when to advise a client to make direct amends with family, friends, and associates who have been harmed by the client's past tax debts
• Describe a good practice to get into when working with reformed Tax Stumblers
• Differentiate between the characteristics applying to flippant tax delinquents as opposed to Tax Stumblers
• Identify what might prevent a taxpayer from properly filing tax returns and timely tax paying, according to author Doug Thorburn, EA and addiction expert
• Identify the steps involved in the belief that there is a Power greater than ourselves that can restore us to tax compliance and how it relates to tax delinquency
• Recognize good client candidates for the 12-step program and how to approach them
• Illustrate the 12-step program through various client cases

Level
Intermediate

Instructional Method
Self-Study

NASBA Field of Study
Taxes (2 hours)

Program Prerequisites
Basic knowledge of tax preparation.

Advance Preparation
None.