Discussion:Accounting Homework Posters: Please Read

We are a group of accounting/tax professionals. We are here to assist each other with problems, questions and issues we experience in our everyday professional lives. We come from various backgrounds. Each of us has various resources that we avail ourselves to on a daily basis. If we get stuck and sometimes we do, we post here to get assistance from our fellow professionals who may have familiarity with a situation we may not have seen before.

That said, as a student, you are beginning to learn the fundamentals of our profession, which is a great one. I've been at this almost 25 years. If you click on my user name, you will see my bio and some other information about me. Click on most of the frequent posters user names, such as Natalie, Bottom Line, Kevinh5, JR1, Sandysea, Riley2, Death&Taxes, Jdugancpa, CrowJD, Skasselea, etc. and you can find some information about them (okay, maybe not Riley2, but they get a pass). All of these individuals, whether they are CPA's, EA's, PTP's, whatever are professionals who have spent years studying, taking exams, passing them and doing what it takes to maintain their standing as tax and accounting professionals. That's what this profession requires.

We are not here to answer your homework questions. Many of us didn't have the internet to utilize as a research tool. I certainly didn't. We utilized our texts, study guides, practice sets and extra homework problems to get us through whenever we faced a challenge we didn't understand. We didn't have the ability to post to a website where a group of professionals would be able to answer our question for us. In my book, you don't learn anything if we do your homework for you.

So, read your texts, do the homework questions, do all the problems in the back of the chapters and by all means do the problems in the study guides. They are laid out in such a manner that you should be able to find most of the information necessary to answer your questions conveniently. Also, check out these links first for additional information, before coming here:

[1]

[2]

Now if you insist on posting your homework question here do the following:

1: Fill out your profile and tell us you are a student and whether or not you are majoring in accounting.

2: Don't lie in your question and disguise it as something other than what it is. If it is a homework question, just say it. If you pretend it's something else and we smell a rat, we will see right through it and you won't get any help at all. At that point, we will recommend you be banned.

3: Put your solution to your question and how you arrived at it.

4: If we can and have time, we might help you.

5: Please keep in mind - WE ARE UNDER NO OBLIGATION TO RESPOND TO YOUR QUESTION.

It's that simple, folks. Play by the rules and we will all get along well in the sandbox.

TomTaocpa 09:30, 29 February 2008 (CST)

I've been trying to make this point for a year and a half - and each time I do - other posters on this board - including our dear Webmaster Tom Doyle-object to my up front abrupt style - kick my brains in and chastise me for being too harsh. For all I know - you'll now hear from the immortal Aunt Emmy.

This was born out of sheer frustration over three issues that occurred in discussions this week. One person got smart-alecky with me (after I confirmed his answers on a question) and told me he was joking (somehow I missed it and I do have a good sense of humor), second was the homework question I saw this morning after a rough night and third was the person who posted a homework question and disguised it as if they bought a business. After they were challenged on the premise that it was a homework question by me (in a joking manner), Kevin gave them a FREE answer, this person then had the audacity to tell us how they graduated college in 4 years with three degrees and graduated magna cum laude and owned three business. They then proceeded to lecture us that they were testing us on what we knew. I nearly flew out of my skin when I saw this. And the question they asked was a basic journal entry question that someone with those credentials would easily be able to ascertain.

I wasn't trying to be abrupt. I thought I was rather diplomatic. Do you know how what the definition of Irish diplomacy is? "Irish Diplomacy...is the ability to tell a man to go to hell so that he looks forward to making the trip."

If Tim or anyone else thinks I am wrong about this, please tell me. But my belief is this needs to be the ground rules for those who want to post homework questions. I am not opposed to helping those who need some guidance. Gosh knows I could have used this kind of help when I was in school over 25 years ago. We didn't have the internet to cheat with, as Kevin and I am sure others mentioned.

I am certainly not the board homework police, but it's frustrating when someone like JAD has a legit question gets mixed in with homework questions. We also had a couple of other individuals who had legit questions, but it was hard to tell, until CrowJD brought one to mine and Natalie's attention. We also had some DIY'ers who wanted freebies with their balance sheets on their corp returns and frankly, if they are that cheap, I can't be bothered.

Sorry, but it's getting old. We may not be able to keep them from posting here, but we may be able to play by some set of rules.

Tom

You are expressing EXACTLY the thoughts I've been trying to convey on this board - but most don't see it that way -UNFORTUNATELY.

You and I are on the same page. Maybe after they see some of these posts that I mentioned, they will see things differently. Let's hope so.

Tom

I've suggested to Tim Doyle how to control it but since he's an Intuit employee he has to listen to the big bosses upstairs that create a conflict of interest world by promoting products to conflicting classes of customers.

But it's getting almost out of hand. There have been several students (two this week alone) who posted homework questions. As it says on the front page of Tax Almanac: "TaxAlmanac: The free online tax research resource and community for tax professionals." They are students, not pros. So, I sat down and came up with this based on ideas I saw others, like Kevin, Natalie, Bottom Line, Uncle Sam, etc. write in earlier posts and codified it so there are ground rules. I take no credit for these ideas. I just compiled them.

Tom