CPA — Client Document Chase

Not legal or tax advice. Verify required documentation against your engagement letter, firm standards, and current IRS/state guidance. No penalty rates, retention periods, extension effects or plan-funding deadlines appear here — all of them expire. Route every such question to current authority rather than supplying a remembered figure, including inside a message drafted for a client. The practitioner who signs owns the file.

Activate when: an engagement cannot progress without client materials; a client has gone silent; you are drafting a document request or a follow-up; a deadline is approaching and the chase has not converged; you are handing an engagement to a colleague and need the blocking state written down. Do NOT activate when: the materials are complete; the question is how to treat an item you already have.

Why this skill

Engagements rarely stall on technical difficulty. They stall on paperwork that never arrives, and then on follow-up that is polite, unstructured, and ignored.

The specific failure: a flat alphabetical list of twenty missing items produces either paralysis or delivery of the five easiest. Neither unblocks you. The fix is to sort by what an item blocks, not by what it is, and to escalate on a fixed clock rather than on how the preparer feels that week.

Process

1. Frame the engagement. Engagement type and year · entity types and jurisdictions · prior-year working papers available · hard deadline and whether extension exists · who actually holds the documents (often a bookkeeper or spouse, not the signer) · preferred channel and past response pattern · fee status. Mark anything unknown as UNKNOWN — an unknown here is itself a finding.

Gate: no prior-year file and no engagement letter → you are scoping, not chasing. Scope first.