The church accountant will call you for questions.

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#1
TAXTAX  
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The minister client's W-2 was prepared with mistakes in regards to the housing allowance. I pointed that out to my clients.

He said he would talk to the CPA that handles the church's payroll. Now my client told me that the church accountant wanted my number to ask me some questions.

I charged very little for this clients to do his personal returns. I really do not feel that I should be teaching his church CPA or accountant to do minister payroll. I spent time to figure that out. It seems petty but I feel that I know what needs to be done and I can amend the W-2 for you. If they could figure out how to do it, the church or him should hire me to amend the payroll.
I kind of do not want to take the call. I have already pointed out that they have made mistakes in reporting housing allowance.

How should I communicate this to my client?
 

#2
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"If the church wants to engage me to educate them on this matter, my fee is $X per hour."
 

#3
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Yup. Don't be a softie.

Say this to the church accountant when he or she calls:

The answer to your questions might depend on several factors, and since I am not engaged to provide you with payroll tax services, I will not be able to collect and analyze all of the information to provide a thoughtful response.

My fee to provide payroll tax advice is X, if you wish to engage for services, please let me know and I will be happy to help.

In some cases, they will try to pry it out of you. I never give in to these. I will keep saying over and over again how I am not able to provide tax advice to non-clients without an engagement.
 

#4
CathysTaxes  
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Tell your client that talking to the church's accountant is a separate engagement and that your normal rates would apply.
Cathy
CathysTaxes
 

#5
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The church accountant doesn't need to ask you questions. They need to fix the errors.
If they don't know how to do that, then they need to seek out a solution to that. That's not part of preparing the minister's return.
~Captcook
 

#6
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I think you either need to be prepared to lose the minister as a client, or take on a greater role in the church's accounting and tax work, for compensation of course.

The current tax return preparer sounds clueless. If you want the work, you could make a play for everything subject to agreement over fees (fair market fees).

If you don't, I think you should do an objective analysis over whether this client is worth the headache for the fees. It sounds like they're priced well below market, maybe out of kindness, but that usually has an unstated "no headaches or complications" attached. And there's no guarantee that the amended returns will be prepared correctly without your input, even if another CPA is consulted.

So maybe, "I'm sorry, I don't provide education or assistance preparing returns, but if you're interested in a proposal of how I might be able to take on a greater role in the church's tax work and eliminate some of these speed bumps, I'm happy to prepare one."
 

#7
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Definitely concur with a lot of the others here. On top of this, get a retainer before answering any further questions to the Church's CPA. Your tax prep engagement does not include free consulting to fix someone else's error.
 

#8
KoiCPA  
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I wonder if the church CPA is an actual licensed CPA or if they're using that title informally. If the person is a real CPA, then they have an ethical obligation to only take on work they know how to do. Not that we don't occasionally do things wrong, but that might guide your conversation and it should be a short conversation because they know how to do research.

On the other hand, if they're not a real CPA, then it's probably a volunteer who is only qualified to do accounting because they were a bank teller once. This person will probably believe "because I've always done it that way" is an authoritative citation and they'll require twice as much work to train as doing it yourself would take.
 

#9
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KoiCPA wrote:
On the other hand, if they're not a real CPA, then it's probably a volunteer who is only qualified to do accounting because they were a bank teller once. This person will probably believe "because I've always done it that way" is an authoritative citation and they'll require twice as much work to train as doing it yourself would take.


Exactly.

So true!
 

#10
TAXTAX  
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Thank you everyone for your comments. Each of you said something that have popped up in my head but I found it hard to voice out. I am grateful for all of your advices.
 


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