About Forrest Baumhover

Forrest Baumhover, CFP®, EA

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Email me directly at forrest@federaltaxdesk.com.

Who I am

I’m a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professional and an IRS Enrolled Agent. I publish The Federal Tax Desk — the calculators, notice library, and transaction-code library on this site — through Fbaum Enterprises LLC.

CFP® (CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®) is a certification awarded by the CFP Board after completing board-approved coursework, passing the CFP® exam, meeting a professional experience requirement, and agreeing to the CFP Board’s Code of Ethics and Standards of Conduct, which includes a fiduciary duty to clients.

EA (Enrolled Agent) status is granted directly by the IRS under Treasury Department Circular 230, either by passing the three-part IRS Special Enrollment Examination or through qualifying IRS experience. It permits practice before the IRS in all fifty states.

What The Federal Tax Desk publishes

The Federal Tax Desk is a set of free, ungated tools and reference libraries for two different readers. For tax practitioners — Enrolled Agents, CPAs, and attorneys — there are calculators and a transcript decoder, each citing the governing IRM section or IRC subsection behind its answer, plus deep reference libraries on IRS notices and transaction codes. For taxpayers who received a letter and want to know what it means before they call anyone, there are plain-English guides written directly for them, with the actual IRS rule behind every answer, plus a Trump Accounts library for the new tax-advantaged children’s savings account created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

What this site is not

The Federal Tax Desk provides general information about IRS procedures. Using any tool or reading any page here is not personalized tax advice, and does not create a practitioner-client relationship with Forrest Baumhover, Fbaum Enterprises LLC, or The Federal Tax Desk. Every situation is different — if real money or a real deadline is on the line, consider having a licensed CPA, EA, or tax attorney review your specific facts before you act.

Explore the site

I use AI to help draft these articles and tool pages — tax guidance moves fast, and drafting faster means I spend more time verifying, not less. I check every citation against the primary source myself, I approve every word before it publishes, and the analysis and commentary are mine. If it's published under my name, I stand behind it.