Tax Resolution Academy - r

Here is what I hear from almost every tax professional I work with. There is not enough time. I am already stretched too thin. I cannot take on anything new.

And here is what I find every single time. They are losing 10 to 20 hours a week to three things that have nothing to do with actual tax work.

Answering every phone call live. Responding to email the moment it lands. Doing admin or bookkeeping or payroll input that someone else or something else should be handling.

Those are not workload problems. They are habit problems. Get an answering service. Batch your email. Stop doing $10 to $100 an hour work when AI and delegation can cover it. Add all of that up and a 40 hour week during tax season is not a stretch. It is just what happens when the work is organized correctly.

What is the one thing on that list that is costing you the most time right now? Drop it in the comments.

Here is a list worth going through carefully.
Responding to a CP2000 notice. Filing a power of attorney to call the IRS for a client. Removing penalties through first time abatement or reasonable cause. Triaging a client with a wage garnishment or bank levy.
If you handled any of these in the last twelve months and did not charge a separate fee for it, you did resolution work for free. The minimum on any of these should be $500. Many of them warrant considerably more.

Dennis was new to the representation side of his practice when he took on a collections case involving somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000 in IRS debt. He charged $750 for two years of returns and $1,000 to get the client into currently non-collectible status. Still below what that work is worth on the open market but more than double what he had been charging. He described it as a total eye-opener.

That is the moment most tax professionals have once they start treating resolution work as a separate service category with its own pricing. The work was already happening. The only thing that changed was the fee attached to it.

Which of these services have you been handling without a separate charge?
Drop it in the comments.

Here is a straightforward question. The last time a client handed you an IRS notice or asked you to set up a payment plan for back taxes, did you charge them for it?

Most tax professionals did not. They absorbed it into the return, handled it as a courtesy, and moved on. And that habit is costing real money every single tax season.

Setting up an IRS installment agreement can be completed in under an hour from start to finish. A client who owes three, five, or ten thousand dollars to the IRS will gladly pay $500 to have that handled by someone who knows what they are doing. They are not shopping on price. They have a problem and they want it solved.

Pulling transcripts, responding to notices, setting up payment plans. These are not add-ons to the tax return. They are separate billable engagements with separate fees. The sooner that distinction is built into your engagement letters and your pricing, the more revenue your practice captures from work it is already doing.

What resolution service have you been giving away that you know you should be charging for? Drop it in the comments.

Here is something worth sitting with. The last time a client handed you an IRS notice, did you charge them to deal with it? Or did you absorb it as part of the return?

Most tax professionals absorb it. And that is exactly the problem.

Roughly 70% of tax resolution work is already happening inside a standard tax practice. The IRS calls, the transcript pulls, the penalty abatement requests, the notice responses. You are doing the work. You are just not billing for it because at some point you started treating it as included.

An engagement letter solves this cleanly. State that the engagement ends at return delivery. Everything after that is a separate conversation with a separate fee. My minimum for a notice response was $750. On top of the return fee. And clients paid it without pushback because the problem was real and they needed it handled.

What is the last notice you dealt with, and what did you charge for it? Drop it in the comments.

Here are the three objections I hear most often when tax professionals consider adding IRS representation to their practice.

It is too complicated. It is not. The learning curve is real but it is not out of reach for someone already working in tax.

There is not enough time. There is. The issue is not capacity. It is how the work is organized. Get the process right and it fits.

Clients cannot afford it. The right clients can. IRS representation clients are not shopping on price. They have a problem they need solved and they will pay someone to solve it.

If any of these has been the reason you have not pulled the trigger, I would like to hear which one. Drop it in the comments.

There is a real difference between services clients pay for because they have to and services they pay for because they want to.

Bookkeeping, payroll, tax preparation. Those get done because the alternative is worse. Clients are smart enough to know they should not be handling it themselves so they hire someone. That work is necessary but it is not where the real opportunity is.

Tax planning, Social Security review, financial advisory services. Those are things your clients are already thinking about and already looking for help with. If you are not offering them, someone else will.

Adding these services is not about pushing more onto your clients. It is about being the person they come to when the problem is bigger than just filing a return.

What is one service you have been thinking about adding but have not pulled the trigger on yet?
Drop it in the comments.

There is a simple framework worth applying to everything in your practice. Automate it, delegate it, or stop doing it.

Bookkeeping, payroll, tax prep input, return review. These are tasks that can be handled by someone else at a fraction of your billing rate. Holding onto them yourself does not make you more thorough. It just makes you more expensive to your own business.

I had a CPA working for me at $50 to $60 an hour handling return reviews. She caught what needed catching. I did a lighter final pass. The quality was there and I got significant time back.

Look at your task list this week. What is on it that someone else could handle? Drop it in the comments. That is where the conversation gets useful.

Here is the simplest version of this idea. If you charged $400 instead of $200 and worked with half as many clients, you would earn the same income and get a significant portion of your time back.

That is not a trick. That is arithmetic.

The reason most tax professionals don't do this has nothing to do with what clients will accept. It has everything to do with the story they are telling themselves about what they are worth.

Start small if you need to. Raise the rate on the next new client who comes in. Not everyone will say yes. But enough will. And when they do, you will wonder why you waited this long.

What is stopping you from raising your fees right now?
Not someday.
Right now.

Drop it in the comments.