Contacted a few CPA/PFS individuals and am waiting on them to email me back, so hoping to hear good news.
Additionally, I answered my own question and found the National Association of Enrolled Agents. (http://www.naea.org/home/) I have left a message for one individual and one actually picked up, surprising for a Sunday afternoon.
Thank you all again for your information and knowledge, I appreciate it. I will do my best to let you all know how everything goes if I receive any additional details within the coming days.
You might be overcomplicating this.
Talk to your military base VITA office about a referral to a local tax-prep company. You don't want H&R Block and you might not want the VITA office to do your returns. (You definitely don't want the guy dressed up as the Statue of Liberty.) However the VITA office will know of a local-owned business near your base which has a CPA supervising a half-dozen employees in preparing tax returns. That's who you want. You don't need an enrolled agent unless you've missed filing returns for a few years or have a huge unpaid tax bill or you've decided to come clean about all your previous fraudulent returns. Even then you probably could start with a tax-prep professional who could refer you to the appropriate specialist.
The military aspects of your tax situation are tedious but not complex. Most CPAs (and most tax-prep professionals) are just using specialized tax-prep software (a much higher level than TurboTax) for the states where you and your spouse have been earning money. Nothing in your situation is unusual, and most tax-prep pros are familiar with military situations. (Or they'll look up the tax-prep guides offered by military support organizations like MOAA and AUSN.org.) You could do the same on your own, although it's probably going to eat up hours of your time that you'd rather spend with your family or on your career.
Depending on how organized your records are, you'll spend $400-$750. Ideally you'll get a tax-prep office that will give you an accordion folder with tabs for you to insert each one of your forms or worksheets. You want them punching numbers into a keyboard (or downloading statements from your brokerage) instead of organizing your records for you.
Frankly this is an exercise in time management, not esoteric tax knowledge or experience. If your time is worth the money, then spend money. If it's killing you to spend money (and it's a hassle) then take a shot at doing your own taxes. If you're going to have these sorts of tax situations for the next few years, then it's worth your time to sit down with your copy of TurboTax and plug through the Q&A interview to try to do this on your own. Nobody cares about your taxes as much as you do, and nobody can specialize in your taxes as well as you can. CPAs and EAs (and all the other acronyms) have to be a mile wide, and they end up being an inch deep in most of it (with really good skills at looking things up in the tax code). You can be an inch wide and a mile deep as long as you understand the questions that TurboTax is asking. Another benefit of doing your own tax prep is that you'll be much more organized about keeping records (like auto mileage & maintenance) and you'll be able to do it a couple times a month instead of just delivering a dumpster of paper to your CPA at the end of December.
I speak with some experience. I live on Oahu but I do tax returns for my daughter (a college student in Texas) and my father (a Colorado resident in a care facility). I've been stationed in multiple states during the same year, I've done TSP rollovers and Roth IRA conversions, my spouse has taken all sorts of deductions for Reserve duty, I handle a rental property, I'm a self-employed blogger, I've done tax credits for home energy-efficiency improvements, and I even get a bunch of K-1s for investments in local startup companies with state tax credits. TurboTax handles all of these situations with no problems.
PM or e-mail me if you're stationed in Hawaii-- I can recommend a CPA who will either prep your tax returns or give you a referral to a good firm. If you're in the Washington DC/Annapolis area then I can ask my brother-in-law (also a CPA) for a referral too.
