The Taxman: still preparing returns after all these years

Willard “Will” Kessel Jr., better known as The Taxman, is approaching his 50th year of preparing federal income tax returns, 25 of them at his office on Fourth Avenue East.

And his busy season is just beginning again, which means for Kessel and his staff another year of preparing about 2,000 tax returns for individual filers, small businesses and corporations.

“I’m fast and good with numbers,” said Kessel, 72, who was first attracted to tax preparation because he enjoyed math in high school, which led him to help his mother and others in the family with their tax returns.

After transferring from what was then Saint Martin’s College to the University of Washington, and then returning to Saint Martin’s to study accounting because he ran out of money at UW, Kessel began seasonal work as a tax preparer in 1966.

He had 49 clients the first year, 127 the next and then never looked back.

In those days, he worked out of his car, driving to see his clients while armed with a clipboard and carbon paper, producing a copy for the customer to file with the IRS but also a copy for them to keep.

He charged about $3.50 for the short form and about $7.50 for the long form, he said. Kessel now charges an individual filer anywhere from $120 to $150 and more for businesses.

But his tax preparation business didn’t become full-time work until years later, Kessel said.

In the off-season, he worked for title companies, real estate businesses and various state agencies where he would save all his vacation time so that he could prepare taxes during his busy season.

He eventually bought his current location in 1989 and made it full-time work in the early 1990s.

Tax returns for his business peaked at about 3,000, but have fallen since then with the rise of tax software that allows people to do the work on their own.

That’s not the only change: U.S. tax code has become incredibly complex since the 1960s — in those days, completing the short form meant basically filling out a card, he said — resulting in hundreds of changes every year that most filers don’t notice and are unaffected by, Kessel said.

The percentage of income paid to the federal government also has fallen, he said.

Although people still complain about their specific tax bracket, there was a time in the 1960s when a person making more than $200,000 paid a large percentage of it to the federal government, he said.

But people also didn’t make as much.

Kessel remembers being asked in seventh grade about his career ambitions, and he replied that when he turned 40 he wanted to be “one of those guys that earns $10,000 a year.”

This story was originally published January 18, 2015 at 5:00 AM with the headline "The Taxman: still preparing returns after all these years."