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Jan 31

I started college determined to be a physician, but since my parents could not afford the cost of medical school, I decided to pursue a degree in Respiratory Therapy. I had already worked in the Housekeeping department at our local hospital during high school, so I knew the ropes of healthcare rather early in life. During high school, I spent a lot of time getting to know the RTs at the hospital and learning the kind of work that they did. My rationale was that a job as an RT was a good way to start my medical career and provide the funds for the large tuition bills that were my future.

When I finished my RT degree (an Associate’s), my desire to be a physician had waned. Observing the long hours and lack of freedom was not endearing and I knew I wanted something that would provide more freedom. I was also determined to get my Bachelor’s degree and enrolled in a local university (Furman University). I wasn’t sure what to major in, but since I was good with numerical relationships and systems, I just sort of picked Accounting (yes, just sort of picked it 🙂 ). This was partly motivated by the fact that by my 20th birthday, I already owned rental property and had a complex multistate return with independent contracting income in a neighboring state. Tax really intrigued me as there were plenty of opinions but not enough attention to the facts. This choice seemed perfectly natural then, but in retrospect, the combination of Respiratory Therapy and Accounting was certainly an odd combination that even baffled my accounting professors. During my studies, I also discovered that tax is not really the domain of accountants as I only had one tax class for my entire accounting curriculum. It’s something you choose to specialize in.

I also had a lifetime love for travel, taking every opportunity to visit a new place, a new restaurant, or drive down a road that I had never journeyed. As a child, I would explore every street within a few miles of our home and when I got a moped (one of those motorized bicycles), the journeys took me as far as a tank of gasoline would allow. Later in life, I would attend Respiratory Therapy conferences solely for their destination and desire to travel to a place that I had never been to experience the journey to the unknown. I once went to a two-day RT seminar in Pittsburgh and drove home 400 miles in the opposite direction. Why? Because I had never been to Columbus, Cincinnati, and Lexington. Since I grew up in South Carolina, anything north was intriguing.

I began dating my future wife during my last year at Furman, and she fed my penchant for wanderlust. Our dates would include rising at 2:30 in the morning, driving 4 hours to the beach, spending the day, and meandering back to be home by midnight. As I was finishing my degree at Furman, I began interviewing for jobs. I was offered an opportunity to work in a health care consulting group but was also exploring work as a Travel Respiratory Therapist (a “traveler”). A traveler in healthcare is a healthcare provider who works as a short-term staff member of a medical facility, typically, for periods of 3 months, and then mobilizes to the next location which could be anywhere in the country. By this time, we were engaged and my wife, to my surprise, was all for spending our first years of marriage on the road. So the journey began. We spent three years traveling, working in 9 different cities. Something we have never regretted doing.

Travelers, as we are called, often have complex tax returns requiring a filing for each work state in addition to the home state return. It is a daunting task for someone who has never attempted it and since travelers are often paid per diem reimbursements, those reimbursements add another layer of complexity to the filing. On the first assignment, I worked during the tax filing season, a couple of my traveling coworkers brought large folders of tax documents and handed them to me. “You have an accounting degree, right?” ……. “Yes” ….. “Please, do this for me – I’ll pay you anything reasonable to get it off my list…” I had already finished my own return. A three-state return that included SC, GA, and MN plus a rental property and stock trades and thought, what the heck … this might be fun. In the subsequent years, I got calls from other travelers referred by my former co-workers who asked if I could prepare their returns. Each Spring, I engaged in an annual ritual of doing a handful of traveler tax returns. It was an interesting diversion, and I actually liked it.

We traveled for three years and my wife had developed her own version of a travel job by working with HR Block each Spring at whatever office was near my assignment. In her first year, she worked at the busiest HRB office in the nation located in Stamford CT. When one works at H&R Block, they are generally required to complete their personal tax return in-house under the review of a supervisor. This initially created a conflict as her immediate supervisor could not wrap his head around the complexity of a traveler’s return. We actually had to go to the franchise owner before getting approval for the return I had already prepared. During our three years of traveling, my wife developed an interest in nursing as a career. We finished our last travel gig with an assignment in the Washington DC suburbs and she was able to enroll in a community college nursing program. That itself was a miracle as the waiting lists for nursing schools were two years long.

I continued to handle a handful of traveler returns each Spring and the more returns I completed, the more contracts I read, and the more I studied the tax rules that apply to traveling professionals the more I realized that there were very few accountants, recruiters, travelers, and especially agency executives that really understood how the whole per diem, multistate tax flow really worked. I never really thought of pursuing it as a career as Daina needed to finish school, but the seed was planted. It was about this time that our company name developed. After finishing a tax return, one of my clients told me that he was really glad that I understood how to do “Travel Taxes”. The simplicity of that phrase and its description of our clientele made perfect sense and I began tossing the name TravelTax around to see how it worked. In 2005, we trademarked the name and I was very glad as we subsequently had to sue two CPA firms for violating our trademark and plagiarizing some of our proprietary documents. Copying may be flattery, but stealing someone’s labor is another thing.

After my wife finished her nursing degree I added another academic pursuit to my oddball mix of degrees. I began taking courses at a local seminary and eventually earned a Master’s in Bible, concentrating in linguistics – a fancy word for a lot of Greek and Hebrew studies. After finishing my degree I joined the Board of Directors of a Bible College in the Caribbean. While attending board meetings and spending time on the campus, I became acquainted with a number of individuals serving in foreign missions who shared with me their frustrations in finding tax professionals who understood international tax laws. They all wanted to do the right thing but could never find someone who could tell them what the right thing was. This, coupled with my own personal frustrations with the traveler’s returns further influenced the founding of TravelTax.

For a number of years, I had been reading a publication entitled Healthcare Traveler (HT). This was a monthly journal distributed freely to anyone with an interest in travel healthcare. It contained some interesting articles addressing the needs of travelers and advertising from staffing agencies and other companies that were involved in the traveling healthcare industry. Occasionally, there would be a tax article, but I was not impressed with the content as it tended to address general principles versus specific, real-life tax dilemmas that many travelers faced. One section of the publication was somewhat of an open forum where questions received by the publisher were presented in an effort to solicit answers from the readership. One of the questions that grabbed my attention was from an individual who had a specific question about per diems. On a whim, I decided to write an article as an answer to the question, and to my surprise, it was published in the next month’s edition. I started writing full articles for Healthcare Traveler, and at one point I was submitting a piece every month. This is when TravelTax went from a winter hobby to an official business. In 2002, we began advertising in HT and I put together a website using some crude color schemes and a Jeep logo that I had located in some clip art files. The yellow/blue color combination remains the corporate colors and the Jeep logo has been perfected a number of times by my wife and staff.

In the first year, we went national, we handled about 60 tax returns. In 2003, that number went to 150 and by the time 2006 arrived, we had passed the 400 return mark. We hired our first employee in 2007, surpassed the 600 return mark, and in 2015, we were well over 1200 clients. From 2006 to 2010, I also spent over 40 days a year traveling to cities with a high concentration of traveling professionals to present mini-tax symposiums for travelers. During the downtime between sessions, I would visit any staffing agency that was in the town to meet with recruiters or leave some literature about our practice. In the infancy of our operations, every new client offered the opportunity to explore a new state. By the time I had filed at least once in every state, the structure of the various state tax returns was deeply embedded in my mind. I would often visualize say a Delaware or Indiana tax return in my head, juggling numbers and theorizing various combinations of income, interest, dividends, and capital gains and how each of these would relate in a matrix. Every state has its own nuance, and by this time, I could rattle off the taxable income formulas for each with a list of special deductions to watch for.

Just like healthcare, every new patient presents a unique set of issues, some of which are new or unfamiliar. Running to the reference manual is commonplace in healthcare just as much as tax preparation. You can’t remember everything. Some new twist, some nuance of a common situation forces you to research various options. One of the more interesting dilemmas I faced was the growing number of Canadians working temporarily in the United States in the healthcare, engineering, and informational technology industries. Not knowing how the Canadian tax system worked, I was not only intrigued by reviewing a client’s previous year Canadian return but also by how the tax laws of both countries interfaced for individuals engaged in cross-border employment. I started reading Canadian tax manuals and attended a cross-border tax conference to get a grip on what I should expect to see on both the US and Canadian returns. Just like the travelers, where I was not satisfied with how my clients’ returns were prepared, I realized that many of my Canadian clients had filed some bad returns that could potentially jeopardize their immigration status and subject them to some serious penalties. This embarked us on what I would consider the second phase of our operations, the expansion into international tax services. I started doing Canadian returns in 2005, almost all of them by hand. Doing tax returns with pencil and paper is extremely frustrating when an error occurs, however, the repetition and stimulus of writing the numbers and reading the manuals deeply embeds the understanding and flow of a tax return more than 1000 returns done on software. Since my career spans the era of paper filing and electronic filing, I am thankful that I once had to prepare returns with pencil and paper. Not only did we add Canadian returns to our services, but my work with the Bible College in Puerto Rico led me to begin preparing Puerto Rican returns primarily as a pro bono service for the missionaries and permanent staff teaching at the college. This expanded to regular clients who are either employed or investors in the Puerto Rican economy.

In 2003, I also began dealing with many audits of Healthcare Travelers. Tax audits, and working with auditors can be a real-life horror if you don’t know the structure of IRS protocol. Any Enrolled Agent (EA), CPA, or attorney can represent a client before the Internal Revenue Service and for the most part, any state revenue agency. Audit defense, however, is an art that requires you to function as an attorney without the benefit of all the coursework in litigation and procedure. The National Association of Enrolled Agents (NAEA) offers a three-year curriculum in representation, and I attended these sessions in 2003 through 2006 in Washington DC. After the third year, you are designated as a “Fellow” of the National Tax Practice Institute (NTPI). It is an extremely beneficial three-year course, and I am grateful for the foundation that it provided me. As our practice grew, the capability of representing clients in tax controversies was becoming non-negotiable, especially in specialty areas where we operate. I have always taken the mindset that if I prepare the return, I should defend it for free or pay the interest/penalties if I am wrong.

The last component of our practice that slowly developed over time is reimbursement policy services which focus on a staffing agency’s compliance obligations when paying per diems. Staffing agencies are required to vet any employee/contractor to whom they intend to provide reimbursements excluded from reportable wages (tax-free). It involves reviewing the documentation that the agency uses in their due diligence screening of a traveler’s tax status, and concentrated training for recruiters/staffing agency employees so that every employee is on the same page. Over the last 10 years, the IRS has ramped up its focus on per diem policies of staffing agencies, and our engagements have increased annually. In the future, we will be offering web-based video training services and certifications for recruiters and staffing agency employees.

When I finished the three-year curriculum at the NTPI, I wanted something more than the standard seminar for my continuing education. In 2008 I enrolled in the graduate-level tax program at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. This was an incredibly challenging yet phenomenal experience, and I still take random classes as a part of my continuing education. What Golden Gate University offers in the taxation curriculum that differs from other schools is a faculty that has significant work experience. For example, my choices for professors teaching the tax procedure class – a class in which the legal framework of the Internal Revenue Service is studied – were either a retired Tax Court judge of 25 years or the Pacific Director of IRS Chief Counsel. Most tax procedure classes at other schools are taught by spectator CPAs or attorneys who throw together a series of facts vs. real-life experience and practice. It took me five years to finish the coursework and two years to finish the very last class due to my Father’s death, my mother’s medical needs, and then the adoption of our two boys. Three different semesters I enrolled and dropped the same, last class until I finally pushed through.

If you have read this far, I consider it a compliment. Life has certainly provided a set of twists and turns, but through it all, God made it an interesting journey, and the road ahead is bound to have a few more surprises/ Joe

David Wood

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