21d • General discussion
From Eight Years Unfiled to NTPI Fellow: What Tax Pros Get Wrong About the Clients They Serve
I want to tell you something most enrolled agents will never admit.
I was the client first.
Eight years of unfiled returns. A mortgage business that died in the 2008 crash. A growing tax debt I could not bring myself to look at. Notices stacked in a drawer I stopped opening. The kind of silence that feels like survival until it becomes the thing killing you.
I sat across from Ernie Mattison, a former IRS agent turned EA, the day I finally walked in. I remember the chair. I remember the coffee. I remember thinking he was going to look at me the way I had been looking at myself.
He didn't.
That moment is why I do this work. And it is why I am writing this piece for the people in our industry who have never sat in that chair.
The Empathy Gap Nobody Talks About
Most tax resolution professionals come up through accounting. Through tax prep. Through IRS service. They learned the code before they learned the human.
That sequence creates a specific kind of blindness.
You see a Form 433-A. The client sees a confession.
You see a missing 2019 return. The client sees the year their mother died and they could not function.
You see a 1040 that should take an hour. The client sees the file folder they have been carrying in the trunk of their car for three years because they cannot bring it into the house.
The technical work is not the hard part of this job. The technical work is solvable. Anyone with a copy of the Internal Revenue Manual and enough reps can resolve a CSED case or negotiate an installment agreement.
The hard part is what happens before the engagement letter gets signed.
The hard part is the freeze.
What Eight Years of Avoidance Actually Feels Like
I am going to describe it once, plainly, because I think most professionals in our industry need to hear it from someone who lived it.
You wake up thinking about it. Every morning. Before your feet hit the floor.
You stop opening certain mail. Then all mail. Then you move it to a second drawer because the first one is full.
You avoid certain conversations with your spouse. Certain rooms in your own house. Certain phone numbers when they show up on caller ID.
You start lying about small things to protect the bigger lie. You decline social events because you do not have the energy to perform being okay.
You tell yourself you will handle it when things calm down. Things never calm down. That is not how the IRS works and it is not how avoidance works.
By year four, the problem has stopped being about money. It is about identity. You are no longer a person who has a tax problem. You are a person who is a tax problem.
That is the client walking into your office.
That is who you are billing $5,000 to represent.
And if you treat them like a 433-A with legs, you will lose them within sixty days.
What This Means for How We Practice
I am going to be direct because that is the only voice I have left.
If you are in tax resolution and you have never personally been behind on your taxes, never had a balance you could not pay, never opened a CP504 with your own name on it, you are practicing with one hand tied behind your back.
That is not a disqualification. It is a gap. Gaps can be closed.
Here is how I close it for the agents working under me.
Lead with the human, not the file. The first conversation is never about the case. It is about how long they have been carrying this. Who knows. Who does not know. What they have told themselves to make it survivable. The case strategy comes after I understand the person.
Name the freeze. I tell every client in the first meeting that what they are feeling is not laziness or stupidity. It is a nervous system response to a threat they cannot fight or flee from. The IRS is too big to fight. Too persistent to flee. So the body picks the third option. Freeze. When you name it for them, you give them permission to stop hating themselves long enough to work with you.
Stop using the language of compliance. "You should have filed." "You need to provide." "We require." That language is the language of the institution that put them in the chair. They came to you to escape that voice, not hear it again from a different desk.
Charge what the work is worth and not a dollar less. This is the empathy point most professionals miss. Cheap fees attract clients who are still in the freeze. They cannot commit to themselves at $1,500 because the part of them that is paying you is the same part that has been sabotaging them for years. Real fees create real engagement. I learned this the hard way and I have the non-responsive client list to prove it.
The Competitive Moat
Here is the part of this article that is going to make some practitioners uncomfortable.
The empathy gap in this industry is a moat for anyone willing to cross it.
Most of our competitors are technicians. They are good at the work. They are bad at the human. They market like accountants because they think like accountants.
The clients they cannot keep are the clients who needed someone to understand the eight years before the engagement letter.
That is the entire client base of my firm.
I do not compete on price. I do not compete on credentials. There are EAs and tax attorneys with deeper benches than mine. I compete on the fact that when a scared person calls my office, the voice on the other end has been the scared person.
That is not a marketing strategy. That is a market position. There is a difference.
What I Would Tell the Next Generation
My son Andrew is an enrolled agent now. Naval Academy graduate. Five years on a destroyer. Quantitative economics background. He runs cases under our firm and is building his own licensee practice.
He has the technical chops. He has the discipline. He has everything I did not have at his age.
What I am teaching him is the part the credential does not cover.
I am teaching him that the woman crying in the conference room is not having a moment of weakness. She is having a moment of relief. She has been holding her breath for six years and your office is the first room she has been in where she did not have to.
I am teaching him that the man who keeps missing appointments is not disrespecting your time. He is fighting a freeze response that has run his life for a decade. Your job is not to discipline him. Your job is to make the next appointment easier to keep than the last one.
I am teaching him that this work is sacred when you do it right and predatory when you do it wrong. There is no middle position.
The Rope
I told Ernie Mattison once that I was not sure I could practice the way he practiced. The patience. The kindness. The refusal to make me feel small.
He told me something I have never forgotten.
He said the IRS already made you feel small. My job is not to add to that. My job is to throw you a rope and pull.
That is the philosophy I built my firm on.
That is the philosophy I am handing to my son.
That is the gap most of our industry does not know it has, and the work that is waiting for any practitioner willing to close it.
I have been the client.
I got out.
Now I throw the rope.
To your survival, Carlos Samaniego, EA The Tax Debt Detective
P.S. If you are a tax professional reading this and recognizing a client in these paragraphs, here is the honest question. Do you know that client's story, or do you know their case file? The difference is the entire practice.
1
1 comment
From Eight Years Unfiled to NTPI Fellow: What Tax Pros Get Wrong About the Clients They Serve
powered by
skool.com/carlos-samaniego-ea-2435
Free HQ with Carlos Samaniego, The Tax Debt Detective™. IRS rescue tips, case tactics, &tools for pros and taxpayers alike. https://stan.store/advisor
Suggested communities
Powered by