Now, fwiw, we send texts and emails to all clients in March providing the deadline to have final info in for us to be able to file (this year, also calc estimate) or we cannot guarantee that we will have time to get to it. If some clients are too busy to do so, I get it (I was too busy for me, too
).In the above situations, I can respond to your 2nd sentence that, certainly, we would pay any penalty if a client owed one as a result of anything we had advised. We paid $2k penalties for 2 separate clients last year (yes, $4k) b/c we didn’t send in a partnership extension because they had not signed FPAs for having returns prepared (I hope we all can remember the initial pandemic confusion last year???) Anyway, long story short, we knew they probably were going to sign as they were already personal clients, so we really should have poked them and asked but we literally didn’t think about it, seemed rules were changing every day and we were trying to notify clients, plan for pandemic protection, hoping our team members’ kids were back in school in 2 weeks, etc. Of course, we wrote letters of explanation to the IRS and the 2nd client just got refund check, about 10 mos later, and endorsed it over to us. That was going to be a real ouch of a hit for us, but we were pretty sure the IRS was having to take care of a lot of these issues and that we would get the $$ back.
Anyway, it has been a difficult couple of years for CPAs just to keep up with ongoing changes - a few states didn’t comply until near the deadline and a few still haven’t (don’t know exact number) but it deadlines been a moving target for CPAs with clients in multiple states for 2 years in a row. For example, NC complied on tax extension but is (last I saw) charging interest if any balance due is not paid 4/15. So, anyway, I’m inclined to give the CPAs the benefit of the doubt.
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