Think you heard it all? Listen to what tax preparers hear
By Ad Crable
Published Apr 24, 2006 13:50
“Probably hungover,” Patricia Turner told me.
She wasn’t, though all 21 employees at Mangold’s Tax Service rented a dining room at Tobias S. Frogg that night to celebrate the end of the “season.”
Today, you can get a parking spot smack-dab in front of the friendly Columbia Avenue tax-preparation business where all but seven of the 21 employees are related.
But in the last four months, more than 12,000 clients have sat across from Turner, her younger sister, Doris Cooper, and eight other tax preparers, fidgeting and sweating through one of life’s certainties.
Everyone from the chicken catcher by occupation to the woman who wanted to declare her boyfriend as a dependent.
Oh, the things they hear and see.
Like the woman who wanted to write off her new breast implants as a medical expense.
Like the stunned couple whose 17-year-old son quietly announced that his girlfriend was declaring their new baby. (The boy confided to Turner that he had been waiting for a “safe” place to break the news to his parents.)
Like the client who wanted to deduct the dog as a home security system.
Like the woman who grabbed her husband’s itemized prescription bills and demanded to know why he was buying Viagra.
Like the tax preparer who left her cubicle for a moment and returned to find the husband wiping a bloody ear and the wife nursing a split nose.
More than one spouse has dropped the I-think-we-should-divorce bombshell in front of the sisters.
It’s been the place where a spouse finds out the couple’s 401(k) retirement funds have been drained.
“You have to be a psychiatrist,” says Vicki Avelizzi, another tax preparer.
There are the heartbreakers. Like breadwinners who are laid off and the family is scraping just to pay the bills and they have to be told they also owe Uncle Sam.
Or the elderly woman who lost her husband several months earlier and showed up with a box of everything that had come in the mail for months.
Turner fished through the documents and realized utility bills and basic services had not been paid. Her husband had always handled such matters, the woman said.
Turner backed up clients the rest of the day, but she took the time to make calls to straighten out the overdue bills and draw up a list of monthly bills for the widow.
Not all reactions are bad, of course. The preparers have been hugged and high-fived when they’ve come up with the “R” word.
Most people, in fact, go home with refunds.
Clients who came to Mangold’s mainly by word of mouth come year after year. They tell the preparers about new jobs and marriages and children and grandchildren.
“It’s just neat that they involve us with their lives,” says Turner.
Last year, when Mangold’s was one of nine large tax services in the entire United States singled out by the IRS for exceptionally clean returns, Turner was flown to Atlanta and grilled on how they do it.
No one could believe how informally the Mangold’s office is run. Tax preparers wear polo shirts, and vacation photos and framed tax jokes surround computers and calculators.
And didn’t they know the trend in tax preparation is to phase out person-to-person sessions in favor of tax info drop-offs?
Won’t happen, says Turner. Both she and her sister can’t imagine losing touch with the humanity that streams into their cubicles once a year.
Warts and all.
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The Voices column is written by a rotating team of New Era staffers. It appears Mondays.
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