Campus to clients: a blended approach to teaching tax writing skills.

• Author: Nellen, Annette

THE TAX PROFESSION HAS LONG RECOGnized that the ability to write helps CPAs advance to more responsibility and higher pay. From the CPA exam, which tests written skills, through an entire career, tax professionals need to structure an argument and express it in clear, correct prose.

In 1961, the AICPA used a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to determine "the common body of knowledge needed by those about to begin their professional careers as certified public accountants" (Roy and MacNeill, "Horizons for a Profession: The Common Body of Knowledge," 122 Journal of Accountancy 38 (September 1966)). When, as part of this study, senior tax professionals ranked 53 items of knowledge and skill needed by entry-level accountants, written and oral communication appeared at the top of the list.

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In 1989, the country's largest CPA firms co-authored a white paper titled "Perspectives on Education: Capabilities for Success in the Accounting Profession" (American Accounting Association, 1989, available at http://aaahq.org/aecc/big8/cover.htm). In that paper, the authors stated that the ability to obtain, analyze, and present knowledge is a critical skill for tax professionals and that the profession needs to encourage this skill for continued growth.

The written or oral presentation of tax knowledge challenges tax professionals, especially those new to the profession. Their schooling focused on learning a considerable and ever-growing body of technical knowledge and applying it to compliance services but did not emphasize communication.

By not learning to communicate well, however, especially in written form, tax professionals limit their practice to compliance services. "If we want to shift from more of a compliance-driven tax practice to one that is more consultative, we need to invest in providing training to develop and increase the writing skills of our professionals who will deliver these services," said a tax managing director from RSM McGladrey. That firm's leaders consider writing to be at or near the top of a tax professional's requisite skills. They see it as the driving factor behind the organization's strategic plan for growth.

In response to management's interest in writing, course developers at McGladrey adopted a blended approach to teaching writing skills. The program they created included tax examples and exercises that followed the profession's best practices and the protocols of the firm. Other firms and academic programs could adapt this model to suit their distinctive situations and needs.

This column describes how this group of tax professionals, one of whom is also an adult learning specialist, collaborated with a writing consultant to create a distinctive training experience for CPAs on how to write for the profession. The writing program they created offers a model to other firms and to tax educators who realize the importance of teaching writing but do not feel they have the time or expertise to develop their own program, or do not see how to fit yet another "extra" into an already overloaded curriculum.

The Need

The need to write pervades every area of responsibility in the tax profession. Whether tax professionals are responding to a question, requesting information, preparing a tax return, conducting tax research, or writing a tax memo, they produce a written document as the final deliverable. Informally, tax professionals use e-mail to request information, schedule meetings, and address other corporate interactions. All these documents must be well written to present the writer and the organization in a positive light.

If the documents...