Every article we have written this season argues that the work can leave your building safely. None of them says what that actually looks like on a Monday morning.
This one does. It is the mechanics of handing us five returns from your extension pile — what has to happen before anything moves, what you send, what the case does while we hold it, and what lands back on your desk. No pricing, no argument. Just the process, in the order it happens.
A firm deciding whether to risk five returns is not really weighing the returns. It is weighing an unknown week. An unknown week is the actual objection, so the useful thing to do is describe it exactly.
The consent is enforced, not requested
US preparers cannot disclose client tax-return information to another preparer without written consent from the client. That is section 7216 of the Internal Revenue Code.
Most outsourcing arrangements treat this as a step the firm is trusted to remember. Ours does not. The platform blocks the endpoints that move return information until the consent exists.
For a taxpayer working in their own portal, three consents are gated at first login — terms and privacy, the ESIGN Act electronic-business disclosure, and the section 7216 consent itself. Document upload and organizer access stay shut until all three are signed. Each is recorded as its own signature row, on the same tamper-evident model that carries the engagement letter and Form 8879.
For work you route through an engagement letter, the section 7216 addendum rides inside the letter and is signed with it, under the same electronic-signature consent and the same audit trail.
The difference matters more than it sounds. A manual consent step has no ordering guarantee against a document upload. A gate has one.
The consent names the office doing the work. Ours names Mobility SQR Services Private Limited in India, because a consent that gestures vaguely at “offshore affiliates” is not a consent to anything. The model form and the rules it has to satisfy are published at our section 7216 page, so you can read it before you sign anything.
Have your own counsel review it before first use. It governs your relationship with your client, and it should read like something your firm stands behind.
What you actually send
You upload to the platform, under a case per return. Not email, and not a shared drive folder we are given a link to.
For each return we want three things. The client’s source documents, as you received them — scanned, photographed, or already organised, whichever is true. Last year’s filed return. And anything you already know that the documents will not tell us.
That third item is the one firms under-supply, and it changes the work most. A client who moved states in April. A treaty position taken three years ago that nobody has revisited. A K-1 that always arrives late and always arrives wrong. Write it in two lines. It saves a round trip.
What you do not need to do is organise anything first. A common instinct is to tidy the file before sending it, on the theory that clean inputs get better work. Send it as it is. Sorting a client’s documents is part of what you are handing over, and doing it yourself first is the hour you were trying to save.
When the clock starts
Not when you open the case. The preparer’s timeline starts from the moment the organizer is submitted and the case moves into preparation. That timestamp is recorded, and it is the one we measure against.
This is worth knowing because it puts the start date partly in your hands. A case sitting in document collection because a client has not answered is not consuming the five business days. It is also why the two lines of context above are worth writing — they reduce the number of things that have to come back to you before the clock can start at all.
The six stages
A case moves through onboarding, document collection, preparation, review, filing and completed. There is an on-hold state for cases waiting on something outside anyone’s control.
One enrolled agent takes the return in preparation and stays on it. You are not handing work to a pool that passes files between shifts, and the preparer’s name is on the case throughout. Changes of preparer or reviewer are themselves recorded, with the dates they happened.
If something is missing, you get one consolidated question rather than a stream of them. A preparer who has read the whole file before asking anything can usually ask once.
The platform records how long a case has been sitting in its current stage, which is the number that tells you whether anything is actually stuck. Firms differ enormously in whether they watch this. Some check every case for the first week and then stop. That is the normal pattern, and it is fine.
What review actually does
When the case reaches review, a second enrolled agent picks it up. Before the draft return, they get the preparer’s notes, the preparer’s own grading of the return on two one-to-five scales — how complex the work was, and how much chasing the client took — and a line-by-line comparison against the prior-year return.
That comparison is not a wall of numbers. This year’s extracted figures are aggregated into the same income-line buckets the prior-year return used, and a row is flagged only when the movement is big enough to deserve a second look. The threshold is set so ordinary inflation-sized drift stays quiet and a missing W-2 or a new brokerage account does not.
A five-out-of-five return earns a slower pass. A one rarely needs much. The grading is there so the reviewer spends their attention where the preparer already knows it is needed.
When a reviewer disagrees, they send the case back to preparation. That is not a soft note. The system counts every send-back against the case, records when it last happened, and the returned case goes to the top of that preparer’s worklist as the highest-priority item they hold.
We built it that way deliberately. A review layer where sending work back is cheap for the reviewer and ignorable by the preparer is not a review layer.
What comes back
Four things, together.
The draft return, in a form your software can take. The workpapers behind it, indexed to the source documents, so any figure can be traced to the page it came from without asking anyone.
A preparer’s memo of the positions taken and the judgment calls made, including the ones we were least comfortable with. And the review record — what the second enrolled agent questioned, what came back, and how it resolved.
That last document is the one most firms do not expect and most partners read first. It is also the honest measure of the work. A review record with nothing in it means either a straightforward return or an inattentive review, and you are entitled to know which.
Who signs
You do. This does not change, and it is not a detail we are willing to be vague about.
Your firm remains the preparer of record. Your EFIN, your engagement letter, your client relationship, your signature. We do not sign returns and we do not e-file under our PTIN. What you are buying is prepared and reviewed work, delivered to the point where your own review begins.
Where a taxpayer is working in the portal, the last steps are theirs and they are explicit: a walkthrough of the return, the Form 8879 signature, and a separate approval to e-file that notifies both the preparer and the reviewer. Nothing is filed because a deadline arrived and nobody objected.
What it costs you in your own hours
Worth being straight about, because “outsourced” is sometimes sold as though it costs the firm nothing.
The first five returns will take you longer per return than the fiftieth. There is a consent step you have never done before, an upload you have not done before, and a first pass where you will read our work more slowly than you eventually will. We are not going to put a number on that, because it depends on your returns and we would be guessing.
What we will say is which way the trade runs. Against a foreign-income return that would have eaten most of a day in-house, it is clearly worth it. Against a straightforward 1040 it is thinner, which is why we suggest including at least one hard return in any five.
If the work is wrong
Send it back. The review record tells you who took which position, so a disagreement starts from a written trail rather than from recollection.
We would rather rework a return than have a firm quietly decide the experiment did not suit them. A pilot that produces one send-back and an honest conversation is a better outcome than a pilot that produces five acceptable returns and no relationship.
And if it is simply not for you, you have risked five returns. That is the whole exposure, and it was the point of making the pilot five rather than a season.
The shape of it
Consent signed, and enforced before anything moves. Documents uploaded as they are. The clock starts when the organizer is submitted. One enrolled agent prepares, a second reviews, five business days. Draft, workpapers, memo and review record come back. You read it, you sign it, you file it.
Our desk prepares expat and domestic returns — Forms 2555, 1116, 8621, FinCEN Form 114 and Form 8938, alongside 1040, 1120-S and 1065 work. Every return is prepared by one IRS-licensed enrolled agent and reviewed by a second before it reaches your firm. Your letterhead, your client, your review — our hours. Preparing US returns since 2003 — 5,300+ tax returns filed in the last 4 seasons.