IRS Tax Professional Week: Prepare for Filing

The IRS has designated the week of October 19 for Tax Professional Awareness Week, with training and tools for the coming filing season. The agency’s October 16 announcement includes an October 21 webinar on refundable credits and resources addressing due diligence, identity theft and account services. This is a training calendar, not an announcement that every tax procedure has changed. For a practice owner, its immediate value is a structured opportunity to identify knowledge gaps before client work accelerates. Select sessions according to the returns your team actually prepares and the recurring errors your review process has already identified.

Before attending, write a short case question with identifying client details removed. During the session, record the official document or instruction supporting the answer. Afterward, compare that guidance with the practice’s intake checklist, review steps and document requests. Assign a person to update the affected procedure and have another person test it against a sample file. This creates a useful connection between training and actual work. Merely saving a presentation does not establish that staff will use it consistently, and an informal summary should not replace the underlying instructions when a return presents a difficult eligibility question.

A useful client message identifies the documents needed, the secure delivery channel and the questions that cannot be answered until the records arrive. Separate a request for an estimate from permission to file a return. Explain who will review missing information and how the client can verify that a message came from the practice. For the owner, review staffing and appointment capacity against the expected mix of returns rather than last year’s volume alone. The outcome to seek from awareness week is a documented improvement in accuracy, account security or communication, with a clear person responsible for checking that it works.