I guess the cat is out of the bag.

Here's a little snippet I was sent back when I ran a valleywide gossip group chat:

"dang had grown so rich, he wanted to retire. So he took me to his private channel and told me his secret: 'I am not dang' he typed into the IRC window. 'My name is... Microsoft Bob. I inherited this site from the previous dang, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from was not the real dang, either. His name was Bill. The real Roberts has been retired fifteen years and living like a king in Santa Cruz.' Then he explained the name was the important thing for inspiring the necessary fear. You see, no one would fund a Series to the Dread Pirate Microsoft Bob. So we got off the Caltrain and into the Uber XL, we took on an entirely new entourage and he stayed on for awhile as chief mod, all the time calling me dang. Once the mods believed, he left the Uber and I have been dang ever since. Except, now that we're together, I shall retire and hand the name over to someone else. Is everything clear to you?"

This is a story that really happened, I’m not making things up. A few years ago, myself and other colleagues exercised some ISO in a startup we were working for. The exercise left us exposed to a steep AMT tax, it was a 6 figure tax bill (this was expected and we knew that going in, it was offset by some liquidity opportunity on the side).

Now, if you know what you are doing, it’s possible to get back all that extra AMT tax you paid as credit in future years, you just really need to be aware of the mechanics that enable that via form 8801, it requires variable carryovers for N years until the credit is extinguished. But it’s no big deal, even the TurboTax wizard is fully capable of the functionality! A colleague of mine, with his fancy CPA, completely missed this.

It wasn’t until several years later, when I casually mentioned that I was happy to have finally used up all the AMT tax credit, recouping my full 6 figure bill, that he literally said “what are you talking about?!”, and just there we learned that his CPA completely missed the situation (my coworker being clueless also certainly didn’t help). He called me later that evening to get the name of the form 8801, and confirmed it wasn’t there in his previous tax returns. I don’t know how the situation ended, but it’s possible I saved my colleague 6 figures that day, if he acted fast and painfully amended N years of prior tax returns, and hopefully fired the CPA.

There are more modest variations of this, for example your averagely talented CPA is most likely not going to go beyond the 1099 and, say, go look up what percentage of your money market fund interest was state tax exempt and ensure you get a credit.

For these reasons, I just don’t use CPAs and consider the time I spent to learn my taxes well spent and I’m fairly confident I’m doing a better job than any CPA for my specific personal circumstances, aided by tax filing software and some reconciliatory spreadsheets. I just wish I had a software for the expat situation, since the EU/US taxation is such a nightmare and it’s what I’ll find myself in when I early retire soon.