Don't Shoot the Messenger! Please!

I'm going to do something I really try not to do on HubPages. I'm going to whine.

I've had to deliver some bad news, recently, to several of my upper-income tax clients. They seem to blame me for the steep increase in their taxes. I really can't help it. It's the law. They pay me for my expertise in tax preparation--the numbers are what they are, and if the client doesn't like the numbers, he/she may go elsewhere, and discover (if the tax return was prepared legitimately, according to law, and correctly)--that, hey presto! The numbers didn't change.

I am responsible for correctly preparing the return, according to the data I'm given... I'm NOT responsible for the amounts.

This has been a professional burden over the decades I've been an accountant and a tax preparer. Businesses, company presidents, and individuals all seem to think the results are the accountant's or tax-preparer's fault, if they don't like the numbers.

Hey, look, we only report the bad (or good) news. We don't create it! It would be irresponsible of us NOT to report the news correctly, no matter how well or poorly it is received. Our job is to record, track, compile the information. Our job is to show profit/loss, taxes, things of that nature...we don't have any responsibility towards what those numbers show, so long as we've gotten the information correct, and done all the computations correctly. This is our important limitation, because that's the important check-and-balance on the whole system.

We have to be neutral, impartial parties, and not, essentially, part of the transactions and fiscal and monetary movements we record, track, compile...it would vastly upset that important limitiation, that important check-and-balance, to have us involved in any way in the decision making processes behind the numbers.

So bitching out your tax-preparer or accountant, if you don't like the numbers is, excuse me, INFANTILE! Don't do it. You're creating bad feelings for no good reason at all. And it gets old, so old, as the decades pass...

I imagine many professionals feel this way...lawyers, doctors...teachers, too, maybe? I don't make the news, I just report it, so, PLEASE!

DON'T SHOOT THE MESSENGER. IT DOESN'T HELP AT ALL!