What to ask a new tax client for

A new tax client arrives with a PDF of last year’s return and the belief that it contains everything. It contains most of what you need to prepare, and almost none of what you need to carry forward — and the difference is money, usually theirs.

So this list is in two halves. What to ask the client for, and what to ask their previous preparer for, because those are different requests with different deadlines and only one of them gets harder as the year ends.

Start with one document, not a list

Ask for the last two years of returns, complete, including all schedules and statements.

It does more than any intake questionnaire. In one document you learn which forms they file, which states they touch, whether there is a business or a rental, what elections have been made, and roughly what their year looks like. A thirty-item checklist sent to someone who has just left another firm gets skimmed; one clear request for a document they already have gets answered.

Then four more, which between them settle whether this is an hour of work or twenty:

Entity documents, if there is an entity. Operating agreement, partnership agreement, articles — plus the EIN letter. You want to know what you are filing for before you agree to file it.

A list of states. Where they live, where they work, where property is, where a business has customers or employees. One extra state can change the engagement more than the income does.

Last year’s estimated payment record. What was paid, when, and against which year. This is the single most common thing to be wrong at a handoff, and the only part of it you can fix is the part you know about.

Anything that changed. Marriage, a house, a new business, a state move, a child, an inheritance. One sentence from them saves an amended return later.

What does not come with the return

This is the part worth moving on now, and the reason to ask before January rather than after.

A printed return is a summary. Several things that decide next year’s number live in the previous preparer’s software rather than in the PDF the client was given:

• Carryforwards. Capital losses, net operating losses, suspended passive losses, charitable contribution carryovers, Section 179 amounts disallowed and carried. Some appear on the return. Some appear only on a worksheet nobody printed.
• Depreciation schedules, in full. Asset by asset, with dates placed in service, method, prior depreciation and remaining basis. A return shows the year’s deduction, not the schedule behind it.
• Basis records. Partnership and S-corporation basis, and the basis of property that has been held a long time. Often reconstructed once, years ago, by somebody who has the file.
• Prior-year elections and statements that attach to the return and bind what you can do next.

None of this is secret, and most preparers hand it over without complaint. The problem is timing: a request made in November is answered in November, and the same request made in February joins a queue behind everything else. The previous preparer’s cooperation has a season, and it is not the one you need it in.

So the practical move is to get the client to authorise that request as early as possible, with a named list of what you are asking for rather than “their file”. A specific list is easy to fulfil; “everything” is easy to postpone.

What can wait

Asking for all of this at intake is what makes people stop reading. Most of it belongs in a second request, once the engagement is signed and there is a reason to go looking.

• Source documents for the year itself: W-2s, 1099s, K-1s, brokerage statements
• Bookkeeping file or trial balance, if there is a business
• Closing statements on any property bought, sold or refinanced
• Payroll reports and sales tax filings, where relevant
• Receipts behind anything unusual — the deduction that will need support if it is ever asked about
• Foreign accounts, if any exist, which clients frequently do not think to mention

What a list like this cannot do

It cannot tell you what is missing. A client who does not mention a brokerage account, a rental, or a K-1 from an entity they barely remember owning is not withholding it — they have forgotten, and no checklist surfaces a thing the reader does not know to look for. A conversation does, and usually a second one.

It cannot tell you what the documents mean. A partnership agreement with a special allocation in it and a depreciation schedule with a mistake carried forward for six years both look like ordinary paperwork until someone reads them properly.

And it cannot stand in for your own judgement about what a particular engagement needs. What is required, what is advisable and what is unnecessary differ by client, and those are precisely the decisions with consequences attached.

Using this

Send the five-item version first, with a date rather than “at your convenience”. Make the request to the previous preparer a separate, named list, and make it early — that is the one piece of this where waiting costs something you cannot get back.

There is nothing to sign up for on this page and nothing to buy. If the collecting is the part that eats your January rather than the asking, that is what we build — but the list works on its own, which is the point of publishing it.