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Working As A Tax Intern At The Firm 's Core Tax Services Practice

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During the course of my internship at BDO, I will be working as a tax intern in the firm’s core tax services practice. While BDO prepares returns for a wide variety of clients in numerous industries, the Rosemont office, where I am interning, has a vast restaurant practice and an abundance of individual clients. This is due to the merging of several small local firms who were eventually acquired by BDO. While the Chicago office prepares many of the larger returns, Rosemont’s numerous industry specializations, namely restaurants and rental properties, makes for a unique internship opportunity.
Thus far, the majority of my work involves preparing partnership returns for rental and lodging partnerships. Therefore, I have learned my way …show more content…

To find this information, it is often necessary to access the partnerships general ledger and evaluate the contributions that were made during the year. The general ledger is also helpful in discerning the nature of certain vague account titles such as “building improvements.” When determining how these assets should be depreciated for tax purposes, the general ledger provides adequate detail to determine the appropriate MACRS recovery period.
After the client provided trial balance has been reformatted and its accounts have been made more specific, I often have to perform an accrual to cash conversion. This is because the clients books are kept on an accrual basis but their returns are prepared under the cash basis method of accounting. Therefore, because the cash method only reflects transactions for which cash was paid or received in the current period, accounts such as accrued expenses, accounts payable, and prepaid rent cannot be included on the return. Therefore is necessary to make adjustments to the trial balance before it is imported into the tax software. For example, to remove accounts receivable from the trial balance before I import it, I would credit accounts receivable and debit revenue. Once all accrual accounts have been reversed out, I use the newly created tax trial balance to complete the actual return.
Once the return is completed and deemed correct, I then update the basis schedules for each member of the partnership to account for their outside

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