Most people choose a preparer by recommendation and then spend the first meeting being interviewed rather than interviewing. That is backward. You are buying a relationship that will handle the most consequential paperwork your household or business produces, and the meeting where you find out whether it fits is free.
Six questions. Each one has an answer that tells you something, and one of them tells you almost everything.
What kind of clients do you mostly work with?
You are listening for whether your situation is ordinary for them. A practice built around retirees with investment income is excellent at that and may have prepared very few returns for a business with employees and equipment. Neither is better. They are different muscles.
A good answer is specific and includes what they do not do. Somebody who says they handle everything is either very large or has not thought about it. Somebody who says most of my work is small trades and rental property, and I refer out anything with a trust in it, has told you exactly where you fit.
Who will actually prepare my return?
In a practice of any size, the person you are sitting with may review your return rather than build it. That is fine and normal. What is not fine is not knowing.
Ask who does the preparation, who reviews it, and who you call in July with a question. Ask what their credential is, because the word accountant is not itself a license. A certified public accountant, an enrolled agent, or an attorney can represent you before the tax authority. Someone without one of those can prepare a return and cannot stand in for you if it is questioned.
How do you charge, and what makes the number go up?
The structure varies and none of the common ones is wrong. A flat fee per return, an hourly rate, or a monthly arrangement that bundles bookkeeping with the annual filing.
What you want is the second half of the question. What turns a routine engagement into an expensive one. The honest answers are usually the same: records that arrive as a box rather than a file, transactions that have to be researched, a return that has to be amended, a year with a sale of property in it, or a client who sends documents in four batches across two months.
Anyone who answers that question in detail is telling you how to keep their bill low, which is a good sign about how they will treat you generally.
What do you need from me, and by when?
A practice that runs well has a system. A list, a portal or a folder, a deadline that sits well before the filing deadline, and a clear statement of what happens if you miss it.
The date matters more than people think. Preparers work through an enormous compression in the weeks before the deadline, and a client who arrives inside that window gets less attention than one who arrived in February, regardless of anybody's intentions. Ask what their cutoff is for filing on time rather than on extension, and treat it as real.
Also ask what they want during the year rather than at the end of it. The useful answer usually involves a check in before year end, while there is still time to do something about what the numbers say.
What happens if I get a notice?
The answer separates a filing service from an adviser. Some practices include correspondence about a return they prepared. Some bill it hourly. Some do not handle it at all.
None of those is unreasonable as long as it is stated. What you are avoiding is the discovery, in the middle of an actual problem, that the person who prepared the return considers their work finished at filing. Ask directly and ask what it costs.
Ask also whether they carry professional liability coverage. Most established practices do, and the question is answered easily by anyone who does.
What do you think I should be doing differently?
This is the one that tells you almost everything, and it works best at the end of a first meeting where you have described your situation.
A good answer is specific, small, and immediate. Start tracking mileage. Open a second account and run the business through it. Stop filing in the first week of February because your corrected forms arrive in March. Somebody who can produce a concrete observation twenty minutes into knowing you is somebody who has seen a lot of these and is paying attention.
An answer that consists of reassurance is a warning. So is an answer that immediately proposes an elaborate structure. A preparer who suggests something aggressive at a first meeting, before seeing a single document, is describing how they will handle your return when nobody is watching.
What to do with the answers
Have the same conversation with two practices rather than one. It costs an afternoon and the comparison is what makes the answers legible, because a response only sounds unusual next to a different one.
Then choose partly on competence and partly on whether you will actually call them. A slightly less impressive preparer you feel comfortable phoning in July, with a question you suspect is stupid, will save you more money over a decade than a distinguished one you avoid. That is the part nobody puts in the criteria and it is the part that decides it.
One practical note on timing. Do this in the summer or the early fall, not in March. A preparer in the compressed weeks before the filing deadline cannot give a prospective client a proper hour, and the ones who can are the ones with capacity you should be curious about. A meeting in September also lands while there is still time to act on whatever comes out of it, which is the difference between advice and a postmortem.