Tax Preparation?

[KellyJef]

From what I know, those people are merely volunteers. They have to take an 8 hour class and then they are deemed 'able' to help military members prepare their taxes. It was then that I found out that they do not generally have any specialized knowledge, much less a CPA, and that they are just volunteers.

This is the same situation for seniors having their taxes done at senior centers. The "volunteers" have very minimal training and make some serious errors. DH and I plus a few senior relatives had our taxes done at the senior center and found the volunteer had, in fact, made errors that we were very lucky to have caught ourselves.

Now I pay the $60 to have a professional do all of our taxes.

[wnlbutterfly]

But just because you walk into a "tax professional office" doesn't mean they have training. I worked for Jackson-Hewitt the very first year I did taxes. I was the ONLY one in that office that had even taken the basic tax class. The rest were just reading the prompts on the program. Needless to say it didn't take long before errors started coming back from IRS.

I made a comment to a district manager of another JH about this, and she said "oh, I didn't take the class either, but as long as you read the questions it's no problem." I do believe that when a client walks into a tax office they assume that person at the desk knows more than they do about taxes.

Having said that, I hope that attitude/situation was only in our area, I HOPE that JH is giving training to their tax preparers, but it would be wise to ask no matter where you have your taxes done. I could rent an office and put my name on the door as tax preparer without ANY training or knowledge. There are no regulations.

IRS is working on certification of all tax preparers, hopefully it won't be too long before we all have to pass the same test and then you will be able to ask if the tax preparer is "IRS Certified" or such.

Oddly enough, IRS hates tax preparers as much as clients hate the IRS. You would think they would want the returns to be done professionally and correct.