By Kip Dellinger

April 15, 2026 -- One of the interesting aspects of a universally known day, such as April 15k “tax day” -- which with automatic extensions has become largely symbolic for CPAs and their clients -- is that for those most impacted the date -– the tax preparer -- one can vividly remember precisely where he or she was many, many years before.

For example, on April 15, 1965, I skipped my college classes, as I did on the 14th, and was in my 3rd tax season preparing returns at my Dad’s Santa Monica CPA firm (613 Wilshire Blvd).

I had gone to work at 8 a.m. on the 14th and my tour of duty would end at the Santa Monica Main Post Office (5th street just south of Wilshire conveniently 1½ blocks away from Dad’s office) at 11.55 p.m., as Dad and a client, Richard Gomez, and I dropped Richard’s return off (a complex return for the time).

Main post offices across the country stayed open until midnight, and so did some local IRS offices at one time, ending a tour of duty that lasted just a smidgen short of 40 consecutive hours of tax preparation.

Extensions of time to file from the 1940s (when vast numbers of people became subject to the income tax) were not easy to obtain and required a full written explanation of why an extension was necessary. And IRS senior management would visit any preparer that filed a significant number of extension requests -– meaning about 10 or more -– to "counsel" the preparer about "abuse" of the process.

But fast forward to April 15, 1970 (56 years to the day of writing this). I was then a CPA and a member of the Los Angeles tax department at Haskins & Sells (today’s Deloitte), one of the iconic Big 8 firms that dominated the U.S. accounting profession for decades (and have consolidated into today’s Big 4 –- Deloitte having merged with another Big 8 firm, once Touche Ross Bailey & Smart).

At 9 p.m. that evening, I was at the legendary Beverly Hills restaurant on Rodeo Drive -- The Luau, to obtain the signature of Wayne Newton, the American singer known as "Mr. Las Vegas," and take his return to the nearby post office. I will always remember how gracious Wayne was (we’d had several meetings and conversations prior to that evening). So, at about 9:30 p.m., Wayne insisted on walking to the post office and back with me and then asking me to join his dinner party of 8 for an adult beverage.

Yep, April 15, 1970, my eighth “tax season”; 2026 marks my 64th April 15 in the tax arena.

For many years, many local IRS offices would remain open until midnight on the due date for filing -- especially right after World War II in the late 40s. In those days, and until the 1954 Internal Revenue Code became the law, tax returns were due on March 15 -- you read that right -- March 15.

Local tax practitioners would prepare last minute returns leading up to March 15, have the taxpayers sign the returns and then stack them up and deliver them personally to the local IRS office (on 2nd street near Broadway in Santa Monica) and the IRS would put them on a table to be date-stamped as received March 15.

An IRS employee would then take the bottle of whiskey underneath the stack (the “price of admission”) and put it on another table. To accommodate laggard tax preparers, the IRS would finally close sometime after midnight, lock the doors and the practitioners and IRS employees would party together until sunrise. Then everyone would take the 16th off to recover.

The apocryphal “good old days.”

A lifelong Santa Monica resident, Kip Dellinger is a Senior Tax Partner at Kallman & Company LLP.