Members Proffer Advice to Daily News Readers

By Simon Eskow

Peter Chen and Ronald Hegt leapt to life, cast aside their newspapers, placed the coffee on the conference table and turned to the telephones that had begun to ring as if someone had fired a starter-pistol.

“Daily News tax line, how can I help you?” they said into their receivers. It was the inaugural moment of what has become as traditional to the tax season as the dispensing of aspirin on April 15.

“It’s a good public service,” said Chen as he got off the phone with his first caller. “As CPAs we feel we have to give something back to the community.”

For the last several years, members of the New York State Society of CPAs like Chen and Hegt have manned a special Taxpayer Panel hotline furnished and publicized through the New York Daily News. The CPAs suspend their annual tax-time—usually in the middle of March and at the height of their own feverish tax season responsibilities—to field questions from Daily News readers pulling out their hair over a subject that is usually over their heads. Society members also extend their tax expertise to other newspapers across the state, including The Post-Standard of Syracuse, which on March 25 received more than 125 calls from readers wanting free tax advice.

“These phones are constantly ringing as soon as we hit 10 a.m.,” said David Andleman, the business editor at the News. The newspaper for several days ran an advertisement in the business pages and the readers responded.

For the 25 Society volunteers who participated this year, the tax panel was both another point of community service and, for some, a welcome respite from the typical routine. On average, the tax panel receives close to 1,000 calls over the two days, presenting the practitioners with a range of tax questions that they don’t necessarily encounter in the normal course of their business.

“I always find this a relief from the office,” said Barry Picker, a veteran who has volunteered for seven years.

Some questions tend to stick with you, Picker said, such as the woman who called years ago wanting to convert her IRA to a Roth IRA because she thought it would provide her income without bumping her up from the 15 percent tax bracket.

“She didn’t realize she would be in the higher tax bracket,” he said.

In the first hour of the 2002 tax panel, Hegt received a similarly memorable call from an immigrant who said he had received a W-2 form, but was not living in the United State legally.

“He wanted to know if I thought he should file his taxes. I think he should get out of town,” Hecht joked after hanging up, but not before he told the caller it would be better to file the taxes. However, when it came to a question about his immigration status, Hegt said he had to back off.

“The three most difficult words for a CPA to say are ‘I don’t know,’” Hegt said later.