Father declared unable to handle financial affairs by doctor, wants to do his taxes himself. Any advice?

Ok, step back and try another angle. Give wifey examples of how a tax professional has saved people from costly errors. They can even go over prior returns and amend them if savings are found. Talk it up, and take yourself out of the picture.

I already have POA..it went into affect when the doctor signed the letter of incompetence. I don't need a Guardianship.

Follow up to all this.....The wife gave me all the documents, I did the taxes (I have done my own and our business taxes for years) and all is well. His taxes and done, paid and the check has cleared the bank. :D

Thanks for the update. Oh the things we do to keep our parents out of trouble.

This is time for you to be tough. Go back, get the tax documents, have the taxes done, pay for the professional service out of his account. Then keep a copy and take a copy over to their house and excitedly say....I have your taxes ready!! Smile and ask if they both would like to look them over. You are the hero...the taxes get done (correctly) and all is well. Would you really like to untangle the mess he would make of his taxes when he cant remember why or what he did. Save all that heartache and do it for them. Smile!

This will be my first year helping Dad with his taxes. But not one piece of financial paper will hit his desk as Dad tends to misplace important papers or he tosses them into the recycling bin. I now have everything that has to do with bill paying and with taxes. Thank goodness Dad has a CPA who does his taxes, but still there is a workbook to fill out.

Last year my parents thought they could do their own taxes, and I never realized it was becoming too difficult for my Dad to deal with it until half the 1099's were missing. Then and only then did I realize something was amiss. It was only late last year that I learned that my Dad would be putting current bills into the wastepaper basket or into the recycling. That's probably what happened to those 1099's.

Ah, I know all about the secretive thing with parent's finances. It wasn't until my Mom recently passed that I found out they had bank accounts scattered all over the place, last week I finally consolidated all these accounts into one bank that has user friendly website.

And my parents stock is also scattered everywhere instead of being under one stock broker because Dad didn't want his stock broker to know how much money he had :P In the ream of things, Dad is small potatoes compared to what other clients his broker may have.

PNWgirl58, any way you could hire a CPA or Tax Accountant to take over the filing of the taxes? It would be money well spent.

It gets sticky when the spouse and poa are not the same person.
In an ideal world, everyone holds hands and gets along.
In the real world, we get attorneys involved when we can't make headway with diplomacy.

My life approach is to try to understand the position of the person I'm trying to persuade. Why don't they want to agree? Maybe the wife is in denial to avoid losing her normal and can't see it's already gone. She some mileage to cover to get to the same place as you in understanding.

Worst case scenario, you can file for an extension to get more time for the taxes to be done.

We have an appointment at the neurologist this coming Friday for further testing, which should give all of us a better idea of where he is at. I am going to use that time to talk to his wife about giving me all the documents. I am pretty sure if we don't bring it up, he will not think about it. I do think the idea of a dummy copy would be great for him to "work on". I have done my own taxes for years, and he has consolidated his financial set up, that I am pretty sure his taxes will be pretty easy for Turbo Tax and me :) Thanks everyone for your replies, it's so nice to have a community to bounce things off of.

PNWGIRL, you rock! It's great to hear a success story. Thanks for posting the follow up.

Glad to hear!