3.) If Your Preparer Serves Chicken out the Back While Doing Your Return, Don’t Use Them
When will people learn? You have to choose your tax preparer in the same manner that you would choose your doctor, and I’m not talking about one of those doctor’s that say they can give you a fake booty for $100 and a bag of Dorito’s. I’m talking about the kind of doctor that if you had to get Brain surgery or your heart replaced, you would make damn sure that the doctor preparing the procedure was as legit as they come.
Well the same goes for tax preparers. They promise you the world around this time of year, with each preparer promising that they can get you a bigger refund than the next one. And they’ll happily charge you a hefty fee for doing so, when in reality no matter which preparer you go to, your refund should be the same amount across the board. Every preparer has to use whatever financial documents you give them when calculating a refund and the IRS has tax tables and charts to compute how much of a refund that you are supposed to get. There’s no way around it.
The reason for this is that no matter what the preparer puts on your return, you are ultimately responsible for it. So if you make around $30,000 and a preparer tells you that you have around $17,000 coming back when you only had $3,000 in withholding, be very very leery of using them as a preparer because if by chance that that return goes through, you will be the one paying back the money and then some.
