Originally published on Forbes.com on July 13th, 2012
Before I started my own tax blog, I never paid too much attention to tax blogs. This is the result of my peculiar reading habits. For many years I tried to at least look at almost every original source item in federal taxation and read quite a few of them in depth. I would identify items that were relevant to our client base to alert my colleagues. Since I have started blogging, I have upped my intake to include quite a bit of state material and will now read things that are unlikely to ever be relevant to my practice. Basically you get to sip from cups of distilled tax material, because I am drinking from a fire-hose. I started looking at other blogs to improve my own and also to network. I found the tax blogosphere to be a fairly friendly and congenial place.
It may well be that you are quite satisfied with the tax content of Forbes.com. Excellent. Go check out the latest from Taxgirl, whom I followed to Forbes and my esteemed editor Janet Novack and abandon the balance of this post. If you are still reading, you must be interested in the rest of the tax blogosphere. I will share with you my theory of the best way to get a fair sampling of it. You need to check three blogs to do this. This is not one of them. Most of my posts are written straight from original source material. Sometimes, I will check out what other people wrote about the same thing as when all the tax bloggers jumped all over F. Lee Bailey representing himself in Tax Court, but generally it is just my take. Here are the three blogs that for me serve as guides to the tax blogosphere.
The Most Colorful Tax Blogger
Robert Flach, The Wandering Tax Pro, is a sole practitioner in Jersey City, although word has it that he is moving to Pennsylvania. He works an enormous number of hours for several months in the winter, so that he can spend the rest of the year blogging and going to musicals. During tax season, his blog consists largely of notes to his clients to not bother him on certain days. He does all his returns by hand, scorning the expensive and unreliable software that the rest of us use. He hurls imprecations at the idiots in Congress, who make a mucking fess out of the tax law, grumbles about the GD extensions that require him to actually work between May and October and sometimes has harsh words for CPAs, who will not be required by the IRS to pass a competency exam, like he will. Most significantly, for our purposes, twice a week he posts the Buzz, which is a good survey of the tax blogosphere.
The Blogger With Whom I Feel Most Sympatico
Joe Kristan is a CPA with Roth and Company PC in Des Moines, Iowa. Joe describes the Robert Flach version of tax season as a two month death march. He actually has the temerity to criticize the Pro, before whom, I stand in awe and wonder. In his Tax Update, he will often pick up the same cases that I do. He has taken to having many of his posts be Tax Roundups, which reflect a pretty good sampling of other tax blogs.
Totally unrelated to taxes, but well worth looking at is another blog of Joe’s that is inactive, presumably due to lack of further material. It is called 42-72817. The number is the serial number of a B-24 that was shot down in 1944. The top turret gunner, who survived the crash, was Joe’s father.
Best Source For Secondary Material
Paul L. Caron is a law professor at the University of Cincinnati and produces the TaxProf Blog. Given his standing in the tax blogosphere, there is a good chance you are already familiar with him, but you never know. Included in his blog are references to scholarly tax articles, that I would not otherwise ever be aware of. The major flaw of my own method of gathering information is that I am always looking at what has happened. Many of the articles that Professor Caron points to concern forward thinking.
Conclusion
I am not going to apologize to any of my blogging buddies that I have not mentioned, since I would be bound to neglect one. You will likely encounter almost all of them if you scan the three I have pointed you to from time to time. Feel free to yell at me in the comments section if I have left out your favorite and make sure you come back to Forbes.com after your tour of the rest of the tax blogosphere.
You can follow me on twitter @peterreillycpa.