The Government Accountability Office had recently undertaken a study to look at the accuracies of paid tax preparers and found serious error with them. The study was conducted to check preparers who had not passed a certification test or had experience working for the Internal Revenue Service. Due to lack of knowledge of the preparers there were unwarranted extra refunds of up to almost $2,000.



Total 19 outlets of several tax preparation chains were scrutinized. After auditing it was found that only two prepared the tax return with the correct refund amount but even these two contained errors.



GAO concluded that bad advice and incomplete reporting are the worst outcome of the scenario. If these inaccuracies was detected by the IRS all guilty preparer would have been penalized. Its interesting to know that 56 percent of all individual tax returns filed for tax year 2002 used a paid preparer.



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