Study Shows Volunteer Tax Preparers Are Often Wrong

By Martin Lukac

If you ask a volunteer to help you prepare your tax return, you are risking errors in your return.

According to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, volunteers run a 6 in 10 chance of errors, only a slight improvement over last year.

The Inspector General asked volunteers to prepare tax returns for two hypothetical taxpayers. Only 39% of this year's returns were prepared correctly. Last year, 34% were correct.

The IRS has been encouraging taxpayers to seek tax filing assistance at volunteer centers, instead of from the IRS. The centers have been developed to assist low- to moderate-income, elderly and disabled filers. They also assist taxpayers with limited English. The IRS provides training and support to volunteer centers that are run by community based organizations.

The first scenario that the volunteers faced was a divorced taxpayer with a 10-year old child. The taxpayer worked as a store clerk and received child support. The second scenario was a single taxpayer who lived with her sister and only had her three children during the summer months.

In most cases, the errors were in the taxpayers' favor. In general, the taxpayers would have gotten $31,828 as a group more than they should have.

There were a few cases where the taxpayers lost out. Those taxpayers paid out $4,411 more in taxes than was necessary.

The auditors noted that volunteers did not always use their interview sheets to get the basic taxpayer information from the taxpayer before they prepared the return. In some cases, taxpayers left many answers blank.

Martin Lukac represents http://www.RateEmpire.com and http://www.1AmericanFinancial.com, a finance web-company specializing in real estate and mortgage rates. We specialize in daily updates, mortgage news, rate predictions, mortgage rates and more. Find low home loan mortgage interest rates from hundreds of mortgage companies!
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