Frequently asked questions

Fixed fees, quoted in writing before work begins. Compliance work is priced annually; planning is priced per engagement with an annual fee for the ongoing cycle. We do not bill planning conversations by the hour, because charging for phone calls discourages exactly the calls that make the work valuable.

Not a formal one, but the work suits businesses with enough complexity that planning changes the outcome: typically from around $1M of revenue, or earlier where there are multiple entities, several states, or an event on the horizon. Below that a good local preparer is usually the more sensible choice, and we will say so.

Yes, and a number of clients do. We will need read access to the returns and the books, and we document our positions clearly enough for your preparer to carry them onto the return. Where the two firms disagree we will tell you why rather than leave you between them.

Three prior years of returns, the current trial balance and your entity documents. We work through them, come back with what we found, and issue an engagement letter. Most clients are fully onboarded within two to four weeks.

Yes. Tampa is where we sit, not a limit on who we serve. Secure document exchange, electronic signature and video meetings mean the majority of our work is location-independent.

By the end of the third quarter for anything affecting the current year. Depreciation elections, retirement plan design, accrual timing and distribution planning all remain open in October and November. After 31 December the list shrinks to a handful of items, most of which only affect the following year.

It depends on profit after reasonable compensation, your payroll, your state footprint and your exit plans. Below roughly $80,000–$100,000 of profit the additional cost frequently exceeds the saving. We model it against your actual numbers rather than applying a rule of thumb.

Section 199A allows up to a 20% deduction on qualified business income from pass-through entities. Above the income thresholds it becomes limited by W-2 wages paid and the basis of qualified property, and is restricted further for specified service businesses such as health, law, accounting and consulting. Entity structure and compensation both affect the answer, which is why the two are planned together.

Yes, but the runway matters enormously. Section 1202 qualified small business stock requires C corporation status from issuance and a five-year holding period. Asset-versus-stock structuring, basis planning and entity cleanup all take time. Three to five years before a sale is when this work should start; six months before a letter of intent, most of the options have already gone.

For a 15 March deadline, a closed trial balance by the first week of February. Earlier genuinely produces a better return: there is time to question things rather than simply record them. Where the books are not ready we would rather extend deliberately than file something we have not properly reviewed.

No, and it is frequently the right call. An extension is a filing extension only: tax owed is still due on the original date and interest runs from then. The mistake is extending without computing the payment, not extending itself.

Almost certainly. A single employee working from another state generally creates withholding and unemployment obligations there immediately, and often income tax nexus for the business. This is the most common compliance gap we find in businesses that went remote.

Failure to file is 5% of unpaid tax per month up to 25%, ten times the failure-to-pay rate of 0.5% per month. Pass-through entities face a separate per-partner, per-month penalty for a late Form 1065 or 1120-S regardless of whether tax is owed. If you cannot pay, file anyway: the filing penalty is by far the more expensive of the two.

If you have foreign bank accounts exceeding $10,000 in aggregate at any point in the year, an interest in a foreign corporation or partnership, a foreign-owned US LLC, or foreign assets above the FATCA thresholds, then yes. These are information returns with penalties starting at $10,000 per form per year, applied whether or not any tax was owed.

Read the code in the top-right corner and note the response deadline, then do not pay anything until the figures are verified. Automated notices are generated by document matching and are wrong often enough to check every time. Send it to us and we will tell you what it actually says.

Often. First-time abatement is available for failure-to-file, failure-to-pay and failure-to-deposit penalties where the prior three years are clean, but only on request, as it is not applied automatically. Beyond that, reasonable cause covers illness, records loss, disaster and reliance on a professional, provided it is documented.

A mix of automated scoring, third-party document matching and specific issue campaigns. In businesses our size the recurring triggers are S-corp owners taking distributions with little or no wages, unusually large deductions relative to revenue, research credits from contingency-fee studies, worker classification patterns, and K-1s that do not agree with personal returns.

We would advise against it. With a Form 2848 on file, all contact routes through us and in most examinations you never speak to the examiner at all. The risk is not saying something untrue: it is volunteering context that expands the scope of the examination.