Nowadays, we are more and more conscious about security here in the San Francisco Bay Area. But security isn’t just about locking the doors. It’s also worrying about cybercrime and cyber problems. We’re excited to transition our website to SSL. All information is now encrypted end to end.
That is very much like WhatsApp or iMessage. This is what WhatsApp has to say about end-to-end encryption: “WhatsApp has no ability to see the content of messages or listen to calls on WhatsApp. That’s because the encryption and decryption of messages sent on WhatsApp occurs entirely on your device. Before a message ever leaves your device, it’s secured with a cryptographic lock, and only the recipient has the keys. In addition, the keys change with every single message that’s sent.”
We are obviously concerned about security and our tax preparation services for Bay Area clients which is why we have introduced encryption. From your point of view – and ours too – you don’t have to know how it works, just that it does. It is rather like getting on an airplane: you don’t have to know HOW a jet engine works – just that it does.
We Don’t Know How It Works, Either
The fact is that we don’t know HOW the encryption works either. We’re accountants, for heaven’s sake, not technicians. Then again, the technicians who design this sort of thing probably haven’t the faintest idea of how the tax system works in the US. But we do. We understand the ins and outs of everything tax-wise, and how to ensure that our clients pay the absolute minimum amount of tax and not a cent more. Concerned as we are about security and our tax preparation services for Bay Area clients, our job is to see that you never pay the IRS too much.
You would be surprised just how many people do overpay tax. We know this because quite often when we take on a new client we see immediately that they are not claiming for something that they should claim for, or quite simply that whoever did their tax return didn’t get the sums right.
Furthermore, some people try to calculate their taxes on their own, in order to “save” paying a qualified CPA. With the greatest of respect that is not a very good idea. We have always argued that if we charge you – for example – $1,000 to do your tax return and save you $1,500, you have just made a $500 profit – which is a good thing in anybody’s book. Not only that, but you also didn’t have to spend hours trying to work it out yourself.
Yes, we are concerned about security and our tax preparation services for Bay Area clients, which is why we have upgraded to SSL. But the most important part of our job is to keep you from paying more tax than you should.
Photo credit: Derek Giovanni Photography via Foter.com / CC BY-ND
