Most of what a firm owner is asked to trust this autumn arrives with a logo, a price list and a founding date. The founding date is usually recent. That is not a flaw by itself. It does mean the owner is being asked to risk a client relationship on a company that has not lived through many Octobers.
Our company is recent too. TaxSQR was formed in 2019. So this article takes the questions a careful owner should ask about any prep desk and answers them about us. That includes the questions where the honest answer is less impressive than a marketing page would like.
When did you actually start?
The company started in 2019. The people started much earlier. Our founders have prepared US tax returns since 2003, including years at Deloitte.
That gap is the point of this article. The platform is young. The judgment inside it was formed across more than twenty filing seasons, most of them before any of this technology existed. When our reviewers send a return back, they are applying habits that were learned on paper workpapers and carried forward.
Why would a tax practice build its own platform?
Because it had to. The practice came first. It filed enough expatriate returns that spreadsheets, email threads and a handful of separate tools could no longer keep track of them.
The platform began as that practice’s own internal system, and it still is. Our preparers and reviewers work in it every day of the season. That has one practical consequence for you. When a step is slow or confusing, the first people to notice are ours, in the middle of our own October. We fix it because our own deadlines depend on it.
We license the platform to other firms because the problem it solves is not unique to us. A firm can use the platform on its own, or send returns to The Desk through it. Either way it is the same system, the same audit trail and the same people.
Who actually prepares the return?
Enrolled agents, enrolled to practice before the IRS, working alongside Chartered Accountants. Every return is prepared by one enrolled agent and reviewed by a second before it reaches your firm. Two of our enrolled agents are the co-founders, and their profiles are published on this site: Steve Rao and Maulshree Mohil Singh.
The team works from the United States and from India. Our section 7216 consent names the Indian office, Mobility SQR Services Private Limited, in full. (Section 7216 is the rule that governs when a preparer may disclose a client’s tax information.) We would rather you know exactly where the work happens than have to guess.
Your firm stays preparer of record. We never sign a return or e-file under our PTIN. You review, you sign and you file.
How much work has gone through it?
5,300+ tax returns filed in the last 4 seasons.
You will do the division, so here it is: about 1,300 returns a season. That is a real practice with a real season. It is not a factory, and we do not describe it as one.
For a firm of two to ten preparers, the number means two useful things. First, your hard fact patterns are routine work for us. A Form 2555 (the foreign earned income exclusion) with a housing allowance, a K-1 that arrives in September and a client who worked in three states are ordinary weeks here. Second, we are small enough that your returns are not a rounding error. They get a preparer and a reviewer you can identify on the platform, and a person who answers when you write.
What is MobilitySQR, and why is it on the paperwork?
TaxSQR is a MobilitySQR company. The group also builds Voyager, a platform that HR and mobility teams use to manage employees sent on international assignments.
That matters to you for one reason. The employees those teams send abroad become the clients whose returns end up in extension piles. They bring a foreign employer, a housing allowance, a year split across two countries and a bank account nobody mentioned in April. The group sees those situations from the employer’s side as well as from the return’s side. That is part of why foreign-income work is where we are strongest.
What can I check without taking your word for it?
Three things, in order of how much they will tell you.
The certification. TaxSQR LLP holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, Certificate No. SCC/2607TL/3365. It was issued by QFS Management Systems LLP, which is accredited by the Standards Council of Canada. Its scope covers the platform and the outsourced preparation and review work itself, not just an office. We do not hold a SOC 2 report, and we will not suggest otherwise. Our controls are SOC 2-aligned: documents encrypted under a dedicated AWS KMS key, role-based access, and an append-only audit log.
The people. Ask any desk who will prepare your returns and who will review them, and ask for their credentials. A desk that cannot name its reviewers is asking you to accept a stranger’s judgment on your client’s file.
The work. This is the one that matters. A long history tells you a desk has done this for many years. It cannot tell you whether it will do your returns well. Only your returns can show that. That is why our first engagement with any firm is deliberately small, and why we have written down exactly what it involves before you ask.
What a long history does not prove
More than twenty years of returns do not make any single return correct. What they produce is a set of habits. A second person reads every file before it leaves. The reason for a position gets written down. The record is kept, and entries are added to it rather than changed.
The platform is those habits built into a system that makes them hard to skip. The Desk is the people who formed them. When you send us a return, you are hiring both at once.
Our desk prepares expat and domestic returns — Forms 2555, 1116, 8621, FinCEN Form 114 and Form 8938, alongside 1040, 1120-S and 1065 work, plus the bookkeeping behind them. Your letterhead, your client, your review — our hours. The platform + The Desk, one relationship.