With designs to fill out your return for you!
Posted by Tina
As if tax preparers weren’t hassled enough fighting their way through the often unorganized, incomplete records of their clients at tax time now the IRS has decided that tax preparers must be trained and retrained, tested, watched, controlled, and managed. There will be forms to fill out, fees to pay and even more extensive records to be kept; a bucket load of busywork that will do nothing to help 99.9% of tax payers and will likely cost everyone more money and create fewer tax preparing alternatives.
“H&R Blockheads – The IRS wants to save you from your rogue tax accountant.” – Wall Street Journal
We’re guessing that when Americans think of outlaw industries, tax preparers aren’t the first rogues that come to mind. But lo, the nation’s green eyeshades are now destined to come under the regulatory rule of the Internal Revenue Service as part of the Obama Administration’s latest revenue grab. ** Under the plan, which would begin with the 2011 tax season, anyone who takes money to help people with their taxes will have to register with the IRS, and eventually pass competency tests and sign up for continuing education. So having made tax filing so complicated that most Americans need help with their forms, Washington now wants to raise the price of such counsel by regulating advisers in a way that may reduce their supply.
But that is only a first step in the BIG GOVERNMENT plan. The next step would eliminate tax preparers (job killers) and place the taxpayer in legal hell! The WSJ editorial continues:
The new IRS blueprint is already in play in California, whose rules for regulating tax preparers seem to have inspired Commissioner Shulman, including his new education and registration requirements. To get taxpayers away from preparers and off-the-shelf software, the state is pushing programs like CalFile, which allows voters to file returns through a state run electronic program. Under the ReadyReturn program, the state will even scour your W-2 for the year and send you a return for your signature already filled out. The eventual goal seems to be to have the government do everybody’s state tax return, like the French do. ** The feds are now getting in on this act, with Montana Democrat Max Baucus and Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley supporting a free e-file portal at the IRS Web site that would compete directly with private tax preparation software. In March, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told a Ways and Means Committee hearing that he’d also like the IRS to begin sending taxpayers pre-completed returns. ** We can certainly understand why Mr. Geithner wants government to do his returns, but please spare the rest of us. By insourcing tax preparation to the government, the IRS would shift the burden of objecting to any error onto the taxpayer instead of the IRS. That would change the dynamics of U.S. tax compliance, trending away from a voluntary system in which taxpayers are expected to be honest about declaring income and deductions–subject to audit. Instead, the feds would apply their standards, and a taxpayer would have to appeal for an exception to the same efficient folks at the IRS you can’t get on the phone at tax time.(emphasis mine)
“Free and easy” is how they will sell it…taxpayer hell comes later. Progressive weasels!