After finishing the main reading materials for Chapter 4, I was pleasantly surprised to find a whole section at the end of the chapter which provided forms and advice on tax preparation. Things such as common tax preparer mistakes, important interview questions, and even ways to consistently and correctly determine some of the more complicated tax statuses were covered. This was a nice change of pace and a good point in the course for the actual preparation of tax returns to come up. I’ve been trying to get myself ready for the real deal but it seems that this course wasn’t going to leave me on my own in pursuit of that goal. Tax preparation takes more than just memorizing rules and exceptions and good interview questions can allow a preparer to get the clearest picture possible of a taxpayer’s situation. The chapter also provided some good forms for taxpayers to fill out that help to summarize their situations and could potentially jar their memory on anything that might have been forgotten. All of these helpful study aids will become a part of my toolkit as I build towards preparing taxes and it’s great that they have been provided by the course.
