H&R Block
American tax preparation company
H&R Block, Inc., or H&R Block, is an American tax preparation company operating in Canada, the United States, and Australia. The company was founded in 1955 in Kansas City, Missouri, by brothers Henry W. Bloch and Richard Bloch.
As of 2018, H&R Block operates approximately 12,000 retail tax offices staffed by tax professionals worldwide. The company offers payroll, and business consulting services, consumer tax software, and online tax preparation/electronic filing from their website.
History
Founding
During World War II, Henry W. Bloch was a young Army Air Forces navigator who wanted to start a family business with his brothers in Kansas City. Home from the war in 1946, Henry saw a pamphlet suggesting a bright future for companies serving small businesses, and it sparked his imagination. That year, Henry and his older brother, Leon, borrowed $5,000 and opened a small bookkeeping business on Main Street in downtown Kansas City. However, four months later, they had few clients and Leon decided to seek a law degree.
Henry wanted to keep trying with the fledgling business and placed a newspaper advertisement for help-wanted. He got an unexpected response—from his mother—who proposed that Henry hire his younger brother, Richard, for the job.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “H&R Block” as american tax preparation company. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as american tax preparation company. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5627799. VIAF identifies the subject as 137733865. The Library of Congress control number is n83021533. None of the 6 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1955, 2018 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “H&R Block” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.