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u/quengilar

17.9k post karma · 11.0k comment karma · joined Jun 2009 · moderator

quengilar 4 points · 27d ago

It is always in someone's best interest to file their tax return, even if they are not obligated to file. In fact, those returns are often some of the most important to file.

You cannot solely use the standard deduction to determine if you have a filing requirement, thresholds are lower in many cases: $400+ in self-employment income, advance Marketplace health insurance subsidies, etc. all require a return regardless of the federal standard deduction.

Households under ~80k of income (2026) can use the VITA Program at UW Tacoma (and many other places), volunteers at those locations will help you file your taxes for free, with certain limitations.

Reasons to file even if you're below the threshold:

  • Refunds/Credits: Filing is the only way to get back tax withheld from your paychecks, and to claim refundable credits (EITC, the refundable part of the Child Tax Credit, the American Opportunity education credit) that pay out even if you owe nothing. You generally have 3 years to claim a refund before it's gone for good.
  • Paper trail: Landlords, lenders, and FAFSA often want tax returns as proof of income. Filing also records self-employment earnings for Social Security and documents things like capital losses you can carry forward.
  • Protection: The IRS's 3-year window to audit you only starts once you file, and having a return on file makes it harder for someone to file a fraudulent one using your SSN.
quengilar 10 points · 27d ago

Local CPA with my ever growing list of firms! I would recommend that you wait until after 10/15 as the extension deadline will have a lot of tax preparers busy this time of year! An EA may also be a great choice for your needs, enrolled agents have full practice privileges before the IRS. Also worth noting that if you have a payment plan, garnishment, or other collection plan with the IRS, it may be worth looking for a tax attorney instead of a CPA, as they can have more options for settling with the IRS. Good luck with your search!

CPAs/Tax Preparers Tacoma Redditors like:

Firms I would recommend based on the CPAs I know or have worked for/with in the past:

Other options:

quengilar 2 points · Aug 2026

I'm glad it's useful! Sounds like I might need to add a "print this list" link onto my comment.

Hopefully if folks are saying things about us they're all nice! We're on the newer side so I'm not sure how much is out there, especially as a lot of our work is business to business. Always happy to talk and do my best to answer any questions. Good luck on your search, it's tough to find a good CPA today, we're all keeping busier than we should be! 😅

Also, depending on your situation you may want to look for EAs as well, they can be really great resources for tax filing! A different level of training but a good EA can go head to head with a good Tax CPA.

quengilar 2 points · Aug 2026

Late to the party but here's the list that I've been maintaining for folks who ask:

Firms I would recommend based on the CPAs I know or have worked for/with in the past:

CPAs/Tax Preparers Tacoma Redditors like:

Other options:

quengilar 2 points · Aug 2026

I just looked it up and they actually only specify a minimum following distance based on car length. So I'm wrong on my base comment. From more digging it seems like the 4 second rule is a police/insurance recommendation, not a WA one.

"When you’re driving near other vehicles, it’s important to leave a distance that’s at least twice the length of your vehicle between you and the vehicle ahead. When merging, give yourself enough space so you safely apply your hazard management routine to plan, communicate, check, execute, and evaluate."

The only direct reference to time is in an image for sharing the road with motorcycles, which shows 3-4 seconds of following distance.

On the legal side, it seems like prudent spacing is primarily judged on who/what you would hit. I imagine they don't explicitly state a standard because the law doesn't set one.

quengilar 6 points · Aug 2026

To push back a bit on that, the two times are different recommendations. The 2 or 4 second recommendation is across the board on speed, the point is to only have one number to remember.

I would agree with you that below 40 or so, a 4 second follow distance can be large, but the point of using seconds is that your follow distance is variable with speed, adding additional variability just makes it more complicated.

All that said, the legal standard is "a prudent distance" so as long as you're able to avoid hitting people in front of you Washington doesn't really care what you do (at least from a distance perspective, aggressive driving is a different ruleset).

quengilar 31 points · Aug 2026

EDIT: I was wrong. Per the official driver's guide, the only minimum definition stated is two car lengths. There is one image for following motorcycles that shows 3-4 seconds as the recommendation, but the 4 second method isn't in the guide as far as I can find.

Car lengths aren't the proper way to measure the gap, it should be seconds. The federal recommendation was 2 seconds at a minimum and Washington's recommendation was 4 seconds at a minimum when I went through driver's ed almost 2 decades ago.

You're right that nobody's even trying to keep that distance, they've all got places to be.

quengilar 2 points · Aug 2026

Got it, that's helpful.

I'm in a similar position knowledge wise, many years of accounting knowledge and a deep background in business analytics and systems. Most of my work is acting as that bridge between IT and Accounting.

This is a toe in the water contract for me, and it's for a smaller firm so pricing wise I think I'm in the right ballpark, but it's good knowing the water runs deeper.

Did you get in contact with the larger firm through personal networking or another route?

quengilar 1 points · Aug 2026

Two questions as someone who just pivoted to fusion ERP implementation:

Are you working for a large company or by yourself? Are you on the tech side or business side of the engagement?

As someone new to this type of work I'm still free to move around a bit for future engagements so I'm interested in what you see as the "best" role.

quengilar 5 points · Jul 2026

As a CPA and general accounting nerd, I'd be more than game to join in if this gets up and running!

quengilar 1 points · Jul 2026

I think what others have generally commented is correct, the layering of multiple broad level concepts doesn't help the informative case. I did get a better understanding from your first Microsoft/Walmart image, but I think that was primarily because I could see a better 2d perspective.

From a "how would you improve this" perspective, I will recommend what I'm going to call the "unstable shapes perspective" (because that sounds cool).

Narrow the data you're modelling. If, for example you narrowed to the balance sheet, broke A L and E into 3 dimensions of size, time and ratio (for lack of a better term), it would probably be possible to model shapes in such a way that a deteriorating business became "unstable" in the sense that if it was a real world shape, it would fall over (the directionality of that fall could be inherently informative too).

Your time dimension is also muddied by how much information you're trying to include, but time plays a functional role in many areas of accounting analysis. A review of some of Yuji Ijiri's work on triple entry accounting would probably be worth your time. I think there's some overlap in his concepts on the momentum of money and the force of money and what you are trying to model visually. This analysis could happen down to the transactional level, and I could see a three dimensional model of the number, size, and force of transactions would also result in shapes of varying "stability" which you could then use in visual decisionmaking.

Studies of Accounting Thought (to the lay person: Theoretical Accounting, not to be confused with Studies of Accounting Theory) is a field that is not well studied or discussed these days as we've moved to credentialization and really locked into the idea that there's only one way to do accounting, but the literature does exist if you go digging.

I think your concept would benefit from a lot of lit review and structural refinement before you get to the presentation portion, but I applaud the out of the box idea, even in it's current form.

quengilar 2 points · Jun 2026

Our firm started on Taxdome, mostly liked it but had a few areas that didn't work for us. We made the switch to Karbon and that was worse for us. We're now looking into replacing Karbon (and in a sense any comprehensive suite) with a client portal and then setting up local tools that work better for us. Cheaper and gets us where we actually want to be but a bit more backend required.

We found that we were just too small of a firm for any of these tools to make sense. They're all designed for you to scale up into a much bigger company than we ever intend to be and there's not a great way to scale them back in the meantime. Just too much admin for our small team.

quengilar 1 points · Apr 2026

You could assign an agent to represent the LLC that wasn't the beneficial owner, I'm not sure that Tacoma could force an out of state LLC to present an owner without running into interstate commerce issues.

I recognize this is an edge case and not what would be the norm for a small landlord, but I don't think enforcement is as simple as saying "produce the beneficial owner".

quengilar 1 points · Apr 2026

If the owner of the LLC is another LLC then all of those documents wouldn't show an individual's name on them. Again, the beneficial owner could be a few tiers deep.

quengilar 0 points · Apr 2026

Not reviewing the AI written law to remove the AI follow up questions aside, I'm interested in how they would determine "affiliation" for small landlord properties.

FinCEN tried to implement beneficial owner registration at the federal level and it was a complete failure. What's the mechanism for untangling 5 layers of LLCs that each own a few rental properties? Especially if those cross state lines into jurisdictions that don't require owners to be disclosed?

quengilar 2 points · Apr 2026

Howdy! I'm a local CPA maintaining a list of local CPAs and firms. Hopefully this can help you narrow your search a bit! Post tax season is a great time to start looking for next year (I appreciate the initiative!), just note some folks may be slow to respond, a lot of CPAs take time off after tax season.

Firms I would recommend based on the CPAs I know or have worked for/with in the past:

CPAs/Tax Preparers Tacoma Redditors like:

Other options:

quengilar 2 points · Mar 2026

PeopleReady offers that type of work, once you get set up with them they have an app you can use for signing up for jobs, you don't need to go into a branch after that.

Beware that the office in downtown Tacoma is not actually a branch, it's the corporate headquarters so they don't see folks there.

quengilar 5 points · Mar 2026

If you're going to go somewhere to do taxes, find a CPA or EA, don't go to the big chains, they're very bad for the price.

If they pulled from a 401k, I'd expect a large tax bill unless they have hardship codes on their tax forms or have a lot of credits to offset.

I'd probably recommend a VITA program like UWT if they're lower income as the situation seems like something that would cover (at least the current tax year).

Getting behind sucks, and then getting caught up also sucks. No way around that unfortunately.

If you'd like me to post my list of local CPAs let me know and I'll go grab that comment. Good luck!

quengilar 3 points · Mar 2026

Agricultural Accounting 2e

quengilar 8 points · Mar 2026

https://preview.redd.it/m7s4el4kocng1.png?width=1008&format=png&auto=webp&s=e39a5a5f2f278f5914c214f683726834eb915537

I'd imagine you would follow the same method as raised crops.

quengilar 0 points · Feb 2026

What DPC provider are you currently using? I'm wondering if we have the same provider as mine has been slow to respond as well.

quengilar 1 points · Feb 2026

It's the definition of tax evasion. If you purchase items outside of the state and bring them back into the state for use, you have to pay use tax on those items, which is equivalent to the sales tax. It is a sales and use tax. If you choose not to pay the use tax, you are evading taxes.

You're deliberately minimizing the tax value to make it seem like it's not an issue, but where's the cutoff? $200 in taxes on a $2,000 tv?

quengilar 2 points · Feb 2026

"I'm gonna save a few bucks on this and that" and "thrifty" are fun ways to describe tax evasion.

quengilar 2 points · Feb 2026

Thank you, I'm so glad to hear it's useful! I love Tacoma and accounting so I figured this was an easy way to help folks find a good preparer.

Both affordability and availability are big topics in the CPA world, especially being at the beginning of the pipeline crisis. I've also found that a lot of people don't know about the free filing options or return assistance programs like VITA, both of which can be a great option for people with relatively straightforward returns!

If you have any questions I might be able to answer please let me know! I wrote up a whole blurb a while ago but it was too long for reddit so I trimmed it down to just this list.

quengilar 8 points · Feb 2026

Howdy! I'm a local CPA with my list of CPA firms that I've been maintaining. Hopefully this can help you narrow your search a bit! At this point it may be tough to find a CPA as tax season is ramping up, but hopefully your search goes well!

S Corps have a fair amount of compliance concerns, but a good CPA should be able to help you keep on top of them.

Firms I would recommend based on the CPAs I know or have worked for/with in the past:

CPAs/Tax Preparers Tacoma Redditors like:

Other options: