Tax Accountant

Most weeks involve return preparation, review, and supporting senior tax staff. You'll often work through complex individual, corporate, or partnership returns, prepare workpapers and adjustments, research specific tax questions, review junior staff returns, and respond to IRS or state notices. Tax software like CCH, Thomson Reuters, or Drake structures the workflow alongside research tools.

What's harder than people expect is the seasonal intensity — tax busy season runs February through April for individual work, with multiple peaks for corporate work — and 60-70-hour weeks are common during peak. Variance is significant between public accounting tax practices (many clients, broad exposure), corporate tax departments (one company, deeper provision and planning work), and specialty tax firms (state and local, international, transactional).

People who tend to thrive here are detail-oriented, comfortable with regulation and changing rules, and patient with research. If you want predictable hours or non-technical work, busy season can be tough. If you find satisfaction in mastering an area where the rules genuinely matter and the work has clear outputs, the work tends to lead toward CPA, then senior tax roles or specialty tax practice.