Enrolled Agent (SEE) Practice Test
Free IRS Special Enrollment Examination practice questions in English, Chinese, and Spanish — individuals, property and basis, businesses, representation, and Circular 230 ethics, every one with a full explanation.
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Practice questions based on the Internal Revenue Code, Treasury Department Circular No. 230, and the IRS Special Enrollment Examination content outline. Enrolled Agent and the SEE are administered by the IRS; this site is not affiliated with or endorsed by the IRS or Treasury. Questions deliberately avoid inflation-adjusted figures — rates, brackets, standard deductions, contribution and phase-out limits, mileage rates and penalty amounts change every year, so look those up for the tax year you are tested on. This is study material, not tax advice.
About the IRS Enrolled Agent exam (SEE)
An Enrolled Agent is the only tax practitioner licensed directly by the federal government, and the only credential outside of an attorney or a CPA that carries unlimited rights to represent a taxpayer before the IRS — any taxpayer, any tax matter, anywhere in the country. That last part is what makes it unusual among the credentials on this site: there is no state board, no fifty different versions of the rules, and no degree requirement. You pass three exams and you are one. The Special Enrollment Examination is built in three parts — individuals, businesses, and representation with practices and procedures — and candidates usually find the difficulty is not where they expected. The individual part is long but familiar. The business part is where most people slow down, because it turns on basis: a partner's or shareholder's basis is the quantity that decides whether a distribution is taxable, whether a loss is deductible now or suspended, and what a sale produces, and it is tracked rather than looked up. The representation part surprises people in the opposite direction — it looks like memorization and is actually about knowing what a practitioner is obliged to do, where the most-missed questions turn on the fact that you must advise a client of an error but may not disclose it or unilaterally correct it. This bank is deliberately built to stay correct. Tax is the most volatile subject on this site, so questions are anchored to what the statute fixes — the sixty-day rollover window, the two-of-five-year residence test, the forty-five and one-hundred-eighty day exchange windows, the three-year assessment period and its exceptions — while every figure the IRS adjusts each year is kept out of the answers entirely. Where a computation needs a rate or a threshold, the question hands it to you in the stem, so you practice applying the rule rather than memorizing a number that will be wrong next year. All questions come in English, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish with a full explanation for every answer.
How to study for the Enrolled Agent exam
Learn the structure before you learn any numbers. Tax law reads like an unmanageable pile of detail until you notice that most of it is a small number of decision trees applied over and over: is this person a dependent, is this amount included in gross income, is this expense deductible now or capitalized, is this gain ordinary or capital, is this distribution taxable. Each of those is a sequence of tests with defined terms, and the exam is overwhelmingly a test of whether you can walk a fact pattern through the right sequence. Build the trees first — write out the qualifying-child tests and the qualifying-relative tests until you can produce both from memory, and do the same for the head-of-household requirements — and the individual material stops feeling like trivia. This is also the reason the durable content and the useful content are the same thing here: the tests are statutory and stable, while the dollar amounts attached to them are not.
Treat basis as the spine of the whole exam, not as one topic among many. Basis is what makes Part 2 hard and it quietly runs through Part 1 as well. A partner's basis moves with contributions, with the partner's share of income and loss, with distributions, and — the step that catches people — with the partner's share of partnership liabilities. An S corporation shareholder tracks stock basis and debt basis separately and in a defined order, and the difference decides whether a loss is deductible this year or suspended. On the individual side, basis in gifted property carries a dual rule that produces a zone where neither gain nor loss is recognized, while inherited property is revalued at death. Practice these as running computations rather than definitions: start with an opening number and walk it through a year of events out loud. If you can narrate why each event moved the number up or down, the sale, distribution and loss-limitation questions all become one skill instead of three.
Study the procedural material as a timeline, because that is how it is tested. Assessment, examination, appeal and collection form one sequence with defined branch points, and questions typically drop you somewhere in the middle and ask what comes next or what the taxpayer's options now are. Draw it once: return filed, assessment period running, examination opens, the thirty-day letter and the chance to go to Appeals, the statutory notice of deficiency and the ninety-day window in which the choice is to petition the Tax Court or to pay and later sue for refund, then assessment, notice and demand, lien, the notice preceding a levy and the right to a hearing, and finally the collection alternatives — installment agreement, offer in compromise on its statutory grounds, currently-not-collectible status. Attach the statutory periods to the branch points rather than memorizing them as a list, and note which are statutory (three, six and unlimited years for assessment; ten years for collection) versus administrative. Once the timeline exists, most of Part 3's factual questions answer themselves and you are left only with the ethics material.
Finally, read the ethics rules for their conditions, not their gist. Circular 230 questions are written to punish the paraphrase: almost every duty has a qualifier attached, and the qualifier is the answer. You must advise a client of an error, but disclosure is the client's to authorize. A conflict of interest is not automatically disqualifying, but continuing requires the practitioner's reasonable belief of competent and diligent representation, informed consent from each affected client, confirmed in writing and retained. Client records must generally be returned on request, and a fee dispute does not suspend that. Contingent fees are restricted rather than banned outright, and the narrow circumstances matter. Practice by asking of each rule: what triggers it, what exactly does it require, what does it explicitly not require, and who decides? Also keep the aspirational best practices separate in your mind from the mandatory duties, because a question will offer you a genuinely good professional habit as a distractor to a question about what is required. That distinction, more than any amount of memorization, is what the ethics half of Part 3 is measuring.
FAQ
What can an Enrolled Agent do that other tax preparers cannot?
Represent any taxpayer, on any tax matter, before any IRS office, without limitation. That is the practical difference. A preparer without a credential has only limited practice rights, generally confined to the returns they personally prepared and signed, and cannot handle an appeal or a collection matter. An Enrolled Agent stands alongside attorneys and CPAs as one of the three categories with unlimited representation rights, and unlike those two the credential is federal rather than state-issued, so it travels with you anywhere in the country. That scope is exactly why Part 3 of the exam exists and why it weighs practitioner duties so heavily: the license is a grant of authority, and the Circular 230 material is the set of obligations attached to it.
Do I need an accounting degree or work experience?
No. This is one of the few genuinely high-value professional credentials with no degree requirement and no experience requirement — you obtain a preparer tax identification number, pass the three parts, and pass a suitability check that looks at your own tax compliance and background. That makes it unusually accessible for career changers and for people already doing tax work seasonally who want the authority to represent clients rather than just file for them. It also means the exam assumes nothing: it will not expect you to have seen a partnership return before, but it will expect you to reason correctly about one.
Which part is hardest, and in what order should I take them?
Most candidates find Part 2 (Businesses) the hardest and Part 3 (Representation) the most manageable, with Part 1 (Individuals) somewhere in between — long, broad, but mostly familiar territory. A common and sensible order is Part 1 first to build vocabulary and momentum, then Part 2 while that vocabulary is fresh, then Part 3 last because it stands largely on its own. If your background is already in individual returns, taking Part 1 first also tells you quickly how much of what you know is habit rather than rule. The one order to avoid is leaving Part 2 for last out of dread — it is the part that most rewards unhurried study, because basis has to be understood rather than memorized.
Why don't these questions use current-year dollar amounts?
Because those are the parts that are wrong by next spring, and a practice bank that drills a stale number teaches you something worse than nothing. Rates and brackets, the standard deduction, contribution and phase-out limits, mileage rates, Section 179 ceilings, the wage base and penalty amounts are all adjusted on a schedule. What does not move is what the statute fixes: the sixty-day rollover window, the two-of-five-year ownership and use test, the forty-five and one-hundred-eighty day exchange windows, the eighty-percent control requirement, the hundred-shareholder limit, the three-year assessment period with its six-year and unlimited exceptions. Every answer here keys to that durable class or to a rule stated qualitatively. Where a computation genuinely needs a rate or threshold, the stem gives it to you — which is also closer to real practice, where you look the figure up and the skill is knowing what to do with it. Confirm the current-year amounts from official materials for the tax year you are tested on.
What trips people up most on the ethics and representation material?
Confusing what a practitioner must do with what a practitioner may do, and confusing a best practice with a binding duty. The single most-missed pattern is the discovery of an error: on learning that a client's return contains an error or omission, you are required to advise the client of it and of the consequences, but you may not disclose it to the IRS without permission and you cannot unilaterally amend the return — the decision belongs to the client. Close behind are conflicts of interest, where representation can sometimes continue but only with informed consent confirmed in writing and retained; the return of client records, which must generally happen on request even when a fee is in dispute; and the difference between an extension of time to file and an extension of time to pay, which are not the same thing and never have been. Read those rules as obligations with conditions attached, not as slogans.
How should I use this bank?
Work one topic at a time until each is comfortable, then mix them — the real exam does not announce which area a question comes from, and recognizing that is part of the skill. Read the explanation on questions you answer correctly as well as the ones you miss, because on tax material a right answer reached by instinct and one reached by rule look identical in a score and behave very differently under a slightly changed fact pattern. Pay particular attention to the property and business pools: if you cannot say out loud why a basis went up or down, you do not yet own it. Treat your percentage as a readiness signal rather than a prediction — this bank scores as a straightforward percentage while the real exam uses its own scaled scoring, so the numbers are not directly comparable.