Francisco Hernandez Tax Services

The first tax return that my mother, Maria Elena Bertrand, prepared was in 1955 for my grandmother and grandfather. It was prepared on an IBM punch ca

We moved to Miami from Queens, NY (my place of birth) in 1971. Shortly thereafter, she began preparing tax returns for the neighborhood and actually started to charge a nominal fee, thus her tax preparation business was born. She prepared the tax returns from the same home I lived in for 40 years of my life.As you can see, it was initially done to accommodate people, but she gained valuable experience and she enjoyed it a lot. It was fun for her as she loved to reminisce with the clients. She would pencil in the forms using her adding machine for calculations and copy the forms in ink after the client was finished and satisfied. As she copied them in ink, she would review the math for accuracy. She would only prepare one tax return per evening.The business jumped greatly in the 1980s as computers were introduced. My mother used to prepare the tax returns on a Commodore 64K, retrieve the forms at the IRS office in downtown Miami, and have my friend Roly or myself print them out page by page aligning each page in the very primitive printer.