Individual tax returns, prepared properly and priced upfront.

A person reads your return. That is the whole difference.

Consumer tax software is genuinely good at arithmetic and genuinely bad at noticing. It cannot see that the 1099-NEC you entered as other income should have been on Schedule C with expenses against it. It will not ask why your state withholding is zero on a job you worked from another state. It happily accepts a rental with no depreciation and moves on.

We read the documents. When something does not reconcile — a broker statement missing cost basis, a K-1 that arrived with a footnote nobody explained, a 1099-K that double-counts income already on a 1099-NEC — we ask about it before it becomes a notice eighteen months later.

That is also why we ask for your prior-year return. Roughly a third of the new clients who send one have something worth recovering in it: a capital loss carryforward nobody tracked, an unclaimed education credit, a state credit for tax paid to another state, a Form 8606 that never got filed and turned a non-deductible IRA contribution into tax paid twice. When we find something worth amending, we tell you what it is worth before you decide.

What the flat fee actually means

You get a firm number in writing before any work starts, and that number does not move because your return took longer than we hoped. The only thing that changes a quote is a genuine change in scope — a business you did not mention, a second state, a stack of K-1s that arrives in September — and even then we stop, quote the difference in writing, and wait for you to approve it.

It also runs the other way. If you book the self-employed tier and it turns out your consulting income was a single 1099 with three expenses, we quote you down. We have no incentive to inflate the complexity of your year, because we are not billing by the hour.

Filing late, or not at all, is fixable

Unfiled returns are more common than most people realise and far less catastrophic than the anxiety suggests. The IRS is markedly easier to deal with when you come to it, and the failure-to-file penalty is ten times the failure-to-pay penalty — which means filing, even without paying, is almost always the right first move.

We pull your IRS wage and income transcripts to reconstruct what was actually reported about you, prepare the missing years in the right order so carryforwards flow correctly, and where the facts support it we request penalty relief. First-time abatement alone wipes the penalty for a lot of otherwise-compliant people, and it costs nothing to ask.