What does a Tax Technician do?

A tax technician is an important part of any accounting team dealing with client tax issues. This position has many duties that help accountants perform their jobs more efficiently. The tax technician job requires doing research, preparing taxes, preparing government forms, filing, and documenting client paperwork. In addition, a technician must have a strong understanding of tax codes and an ability to provide client confidentiality.

A tax technician has a responsibility to perform many administrative tasks that ultimately free up an accountant's time. One of the primary things tax technicians do is to prepare and deliver important documents. Including compliance forms, audit forms, tax forms and more, these documents are essential to many tax-related issues. A technician must be able to quickly locate these items in the office and provide them when necessary.

A related tax technician job is to prepare various government forms. These documents are important because tax forms, extension requests, and other forms are frequently sent to government officials to complete a tax case. The technician is often responsible for retrieving these forms, researching the data necessary to fill out the form and, many times, filling the form out and mailing it.

Another service a tax technician must provide is filing. Most accounting departments or firms have large collections of files on hand, dating back many years, so it is the technician's duty to fully understand this organizational system. Equally important, a technician must also know how to create files so they fit the same organizational system. Future employees should be able to locate the necessary data when that technician is not around. Another technician responsibility is confidentiality, because many files contain sensitive client information that must be kept secret.

Finally, a wide understanding of taxes and tax codes is essential for tax technician jobs. Technicians often attend college to focus on accounting to strengthen their background in working with numbers and tax research, but must also study on the job. Tax rules change from country to country and state to state, so it is necessary to be an expert in local tax law. Another reason tax research is necessary is because rules frequently change and it is an essential part of the business to stay current on all laws and regulations.