I work in marketing and sales and, in my previous life, I was an accountant. It is not uncommon for marketing and sales professionals to occasionally fail at math. In fact, I have watched 10,000 friends and/or family members who were just as surprised as I was in the situation in the video above. It often started as a question that didn’t follow any logical connection to the numbers I was working with.
This was one of the reasons I knew I wanted to be a tax accountant but was worried about the financial math required. I had just spent 3 years in the program but was still worried about the number of incorrect responses when I sent a question to 5 students with 3 different taxable incomes, one of whom was receiving $6,000 of Social Security a month! I moved on without spending too much time on the other tax questions and started a marketing-type job.
After I graduated in 2017 and began my current position, I had a couple of colleagues who did not quite know how to take basic math skills necessary to be a CPA in order to do simple and basic math calculations on a spreadsheet or little-to-no math when they tried to work with numbers on the phone to discuss a tax issue. I had to ask my manager for guidance over and over again on where they were in their math, what they were projecting and how they were performing at the task.
Another time I started correcting errors on a spreadsheet and I got frustrated when I had to correct a name who had written that one of their computer files went to California instead of Florida. I made a big deal about who was doing this and it really would have helped to have people learn how to file online for the IRS, but, if they didn’t, I was worried about them missing out on the government tax break if they didn’t.