I’m old, too, and I can thank IRS for teaching me tax before putting me near a form to be filled out by pencil. I started out, after five weeks of class, taking about 100 calls a day at a toll-free site. We were issued Texas Instruments calculators, left locked in the charging cabinet overnight, that cost $80 each, equal to about $500 in 2025 dollars.
Later they gave me a staff job that included scheduling part-time taxpayer service representatives. The work could be done easily with a computer, but the government would take three years to approve purchase of a machine that would then be obsolete. So I bought a TRS-80 for $800, about the cost of an IBM typewriter that didn’t require such rigid approval, and showed them how to do it. For data storage it used a tape recorder. In today’s dollars the cost was about $4,200.
I left IRS after five years and bought a tax practice while going to law school. I used the computer, upgraded to use floppy disks, to write my own tax program. It’s really not that difficult, except for remembering all the steps when you do it only once a year. And multiple state returns are a challenge. So eventually I bought a commercial package. That was when you could run it on your own computer, not fill out sheets that were shipped off to be scanned for a mainframe.
Clients think I’m wonderful, believe it or not. I was always surprised when they came back year after year. Although, some of them compared me to their dentist. But I probably wouldn’t meet your hiring qualifications.
