People are afraid of the government

Posted on: April 10, 2025 at 19:29:31 CT

especially the IRS. For some reason, they think the responsibility is on the preparer if they have someone do it. That is not the case. The taxpayer is responsible for paying the correct amount of taxes.

Now, most preparers worth the fees they charge will help resolve problems with the IRS and defend positions they took on the tax return, and they can be helpful with that, but that does not absolve the taxpayer from paying up.

Back when I was doing taxes at a place that did almost 500 returns a year (2 of us did them and the owner of the CPA firm reviewed them), I was astonished at home many very simple returns we did. I'm talking Form EZ back when that was a thing. Even the short Form 1040A was pretty common instead of the regular form.

The only complicated returns we did were when there were S-Corps and partnerships involved (and some C-corps) and had complicated K-1's. Some of those got pretty nasty. But 95% of them could have easily been done by the taxpayer. They don't because they are scared. Our software was basically TurboTax on steroids, but TT is a fine program (just way overpriced, FreeTaxUSA is much better).