Our friend the paper-boy CPA

Everybody likes to bash professions other than their own, and I'm no exception when anybody mentions CPAs or the dirt that they play in. I used to like to respond to that type of conversation with, "Do you want your mouth washed out with soap?" My attitude for many years about the dirt that CPAs play in was: Either the common man can figure out for _himself_ how to fill out the forms for appeasing the IRS and its cousins, or, in the cases in which such bureaucrats have failed to make the forms sufficiently simple for the common man to figure out in not too many hours per year, the particular taxpayer who's a victim of this ought to go to Siberia and seek asylum. My fuming about this festered enough for me to figure out how this could probably be done by canoeing from Little Diamede Island to Big Diamede Island.

But then around 1990, the Soviet Union went soft, and the pipe dream therefore ceased to mean anything.

And now I think I'm finally going to delete "CPA scum" from my vocabulary. What triggered my newfound respect for CPAs? Well, over the summer, I learned what one of them moonlights as, after I saw him make a presentation at one of the meetings that we've been having here in the Marcellus Shale about considerations such as how, if a landowner is more money-hungry than you or me and accepts money from a gas company (_if_ that "up front" payment ever even comes - and that's _another_ reason the Frost Farm refuses to sign a company lease: I actually get more payee-friendly fine print as a _paper_ _boy_!), then that landowner can (get the soap ready for washing my mouth out with, folks) count that allegedly-up-front payment as "advance royalty" on his or her tax return and thereby deduct 15% or whatever the number is.

But the thing that I was about to learn that this CPA moonlights as, doesn't have anything to do with that presentation that he did, nor about anything else having to do with the gasmen activity. Rather, this CPA was walking up to me at the end of such meetings to shake my hand and tell me that he sees me in Clarks Summit every Sunday morning.


I guessed that he looked a little bit familiar, but I couldn't recall what _part_ of the route I'd seen him on. So, when I got home, I waded through my paper-route customer lists looking for his last name. It was nowhere to be found; so, next, I assumed that perhaps somebody in his household with a different last name was paying for his house's subscription, and/or perhaps he was one of the few early risers out taking walks or whatever while I'm delivering in their neighborhoods. That exhausts all of the possibilities, right?


Wrong! Where did I see this CPA the next Sunday morning (which was the first Sunday morning that I was _looking_ for his face), but in the distribution center, at 4 am, preparing for his delivery! He's a paper boy!


I think he's doing it to teach his kid to be a paper boy, based on the fact that he frequently brings his kid along to help. The route is even apparently in his kid's name, even though the kid is often apparently at home sleeping while the paper-boy CPA does his route for him. But still, what "typical" CPA would want his kid to be a paper boy?

So, more power to the paper-boy CPA!


If I ever need a CPA, I'm going to go to his office during the week and _pay_ for his advice. I _won't_ do what I saw more than one carrier do at the distribution center this past Sunday: They were walking up to the paper-boy CPA and pumping him for free tax advice, including when he appeared to be trying to concentrate on preparing his piles of newspapers for his delivery! He was graciously giving the free tax advice to them and, I suspect in the process, losing his count of his newspapers. Indeed, one non-tax-related snippet that could be overheard at the distribution center that same morning was that on at least one delivery, the paper-boy CPA hadn't gotten his updates of what customers to stop and start. Well I wonder why?

I hope that by now, by sticking up for _both_ of the professions of the paper-boy CPA and hereby welcoming him to the brotherhood of paper carriers, I've earned my right to appease, in some future post, an ulterior motive that I had in doing so: Stay tuned for a _bashing_ of the "CPA" part of the paper-boy CPA's identity, whenever I get around to writing a certain post here that I've had in my head for a couple of months (although maybe not until after I do some posting about unrelated aspects that are even more on my mind, of my paper-delivery adventures).

Hey, CPAs _are_ fair game, aren't they, judging by the fact that I once saw a big contingent of _them_ making fun of their _own_ profession in a deluxe song that they sung while marching along in a parade?