Same kind of business, similar money, a smaller bill. The question that conversation leaves you with is a fair one: why not you?
Twenty minutes, no charge, and you do not have to pretend that conversation did not sting. Bring last year's return. Steven Palmieri reads it with you and tells you which of the moves behind a lower number were genuinely available to you, and which ones were never going to apply no matter who prepared it. A straight answer on whether your books are solid enough to plan from at all. What is still open for this year, and what a planned return would have owed instead. The plan is part of the monthly work here. Elsewhere it is a $15,000 project.
Three explanations cover almost every version of that conversation. Two of them you can still do something about, and one of them should worry you on his behalf. Twenty minutes on the phone is usually enough to tell which one you are looking at.
The work that moves a tax bill happens before December, while an entity election, a retirement contribution or the timing of a large purchase can still be changed. Your year closed, then it got typed up in April by someone who never called to ask what was coming. Same rules, same business, different calendar.
Part of the gap is planning and part of it is simply his facts. A loss carried forward, a spouse with no income, a building he bought the year before, a slower year than yours. You heard a single number across a table. You did not see the forty lines that produced it.
The other road to a low number is deductions with nothing behind them. Mileage nobody drove. A home office the size of the house. That road works right up until a letter arrives, and then he is the one explaining it for a year, usually by himself.
We will not promise you a number, and anyone who does before reading your return is selling you something. What you get is a read of last year's return, which of his advantages actually reach your situation, and what a planned year would have owed instead. Sometimes the honest answer is that his facts are not your facts, and you deserve to hear that too.
In April that is usually true, because by April almost nothing is left. The real question is what sat on the table in July. Bring the return and you will see which decisions were open then, and which ones are still open now.
No. Elsewhere a tax plan is a $15,000 project that ends when the presentation does. Here it comes with the monthly work and gets revisited as the year moves, because a plan written in February stops matching a business by September.
Steven Palmieri reads last year's return with you while you are on the call, asks about the business, and tells you three things nobody told you. You also get a straight answer on whether your books are solid enough to plan from. No charge, and nothing owed afterward.
No. We do not perform audits, reviews, or compilations, and we do not take IRS collection cases. We keep the books, build the plan, and prepare and file the returns. If a lender needs audited or reviewed statements, a licensed accounting firm does that piece.