We are now accepting returning and new clients for the 2023 tax season. For returning clients, please contact sales@polygonadvisory.com. For new clients, please schedule a free initial call.

Schedule

Polygon Advisory Group Crypto Tax / Accounting Team

Pre-Hire Assessment & Test

Introduction:

Thank you for your interest in joining our crypto tax/accounting team!

Our firm is one of the very few public accounting firms in the U.S. currently specializing in providing crypto tax and accounting services to individuals and businesses. Most of our clients are in crypto, and we require every member of our team to have firsthand crypto experience (i.e., personally involved in crypto) for at least one to two years, preferably with a variety of crypto activities such as trading, staking, mining, spending, DeFi, NFT etc. This is the only way we can truly understand what our clients are going through, and it’s the best way to build a strong connection with our clients as we are also part of the crypto community.

Unlike traditional tax and accounting, crypto accounting is a highly specialized niche and it’s complicated and challenging due to the ever-changing environment and lack of sufficient official guidance. Based on our experience in the past two years since we started the firm, we found that the learning curve for most people who want to work in this niche is very steep. In other words, this is not a job for everybody. We are only interested in hiring people who can learn very fast, have good common sense, are self-motivated, very organized, have excellent analytical skills, have good attention to details, are a great team player, love doing forensic work, and love helping clients and teammates solve problems. In addition, we only look for people who are willing to work hard especially during tax season and who have a strong sense of urgency, priority, and responsibility. A typical profile of someone who succeeds at this job is a person who has an accounting degree or tax/accounting related work experience, is personally a crypto investor, who enjoys learning new things, loves challenges, is passionate about crypto/blockchain/web3 usage and technologies, wants to work with like-minded people and help each other out, can understand complicated things quickly and is willing to put in all the time and effort necessary to grow personally and professionally.

To make sure we are getting the right people and to help every job applicant to see whether this is a job suitable for them, we require a pre-hire assessment and a test before we can offer any applicant a position in our crypto tax/accounting team.

Goals:

To assess the applicant’s self-learning ability, organization and communication skills, ability to follow instructions and the speed of learning.

Instructions for Assessment:

Please do the following steps. Also track your time (number of hours spent) for completing the assessment from start to finish and let us know.

  • You need to use a CoinTracking.info (CT) account to do this assessment. If you don’t have a CT account yet, you can use this link to sign up for an account and get a 10% discount when you upgrade to a paid account. If you use the link to sign up, we will get a small referral bonus at no cost to you.
  • Make a list of every crypto account (including CEX, DEX, wallets etc., except for close-loop platforms such as PayPal, Venmo that don’t allow any transfers in/out) that you have ever used since you started in crypto. This will be your inventory list as well as a list to document your work process.
  • Import transactions in each account, one by one, to CoinTracking. Use automatic import (API or blockchain importer) whenever it’s available. Write down the import method for each crypto account on your list.
  • If you are unable to import transactions from any account or have questions related to your CT account, search CoinTracking support database to find guidance. If still no solution, request assistance from CT support by submitting a ticket.
  • After you finish importing all your accounts to CT, do an inventory check of the coin balances for each account on the Balance by Exchange page, and verify that they are all correct. Document the result for each account on your account list, and indicate the method you used to verify the coin balances (e.g., compare with balances by logging into your exchange account, look at coin balances in your wallet via block explorer, etc.)
  • If an account is showing discrepancies for any of the coin balances, find out what caused each discrepancy, and fix it. Document your findings and process of remedy.
  • After all the account balances are reconciled, verify all the transactions are classified correctly. Document your process of doing so.
  • Go to the Missing Transactions page and look at the bottom of the page to see if there is any “No Match”. If the number is not zero, need to fix all the missing transactions. Document your finding and process of remedy.
  • Go to the Duplicate Transactions page and see if there are any duplicate transactions. If yes, fix it. Document your process.
  • Go to the Validate Transactions page and see if there are any errors or warnings. If yes, fix them, and document your finding and process of remedy.
  • Go to the Transaction Flow report page, click on the “show warnings only” button near the top of right hand side of the page, then look at every transaction that’s showing a negative ending balance. Figure out what caused the negative balance and find a way to fix it. Document your findings and process of remedy.
  • Go to the Tax Report page, generate a tax report for the latest full tax year, and see if there is any no basis error. If yes, find out what caused the error, and fix it. Document your finding and process of remedy.
  • Do a review of the tax report, document how you determine whether the result looks correct or not.
  • Send a copy of your account list and documentation of your findings and processes described above to us.
  • Send a copy of the PDF printout of the following pages (just the first page) in your CT account to us.
    • Balance by Exchange
    • Missing Transactions report
    • Duplicate Transactions report
    • Validate Transactions report
    • Tax report
    • API Live Data Check (check link below)
Live Data Check

Tips:

Make sure to follow instructions in CT when doing transaction import. Also, make good use of the large amount of information in CT support database. You should be able to find answers there for almost everything you need to know in order to fully reconcile your account.

After we receive and review your assessment documentation and result, we may require you to attend a zoom meeting with us to talk about your account reconciliation. In addition, we may need you to go through another round of assessment by using a sample case we provide. This is usually necessary if your situation is too simple (e.g., only a few accounts with regular trading, transfers, etc.) or if you have only a small number of transactions.

If you pass the assessment, we will send you a link to take an online test that is based on information you can find in our eBook. We will provide you a copy of the eBook for free.

Please send all information and requests to hiring@polygonadvisory.com.