Compliance

We use Lacerte's professional tax preparation package for all U.S. and state income tax returns. Lacerte is owned by Intuit, the Company that makes Quicken®, QuickBooks® and TurboTax® software. Lacerte is their top of the line product and provides extensive diagnostics tools on each return to identify incomplete or inconsistent entries on the returns. Amended returns are a snap should new information come to light after filing.

We are piloting a few E-Filing returns this year to evaluate the cost to benefit for our clients. Our earlier impression has been the additional special procedures and transmittal costs outweighed the savings in postage and convenience of a quicker refund.

None of our hundreds of tax clients have had an office or field audit by the IRS in several years. We would like to think our return preparation skills had something to do with this, but it is more likely the IRS has abandoned the traditional face to face audit in our area due to lack of resources and trained personnel. We understand the IRS is retooling and will be asserting their presence again in the next couple of years. Our preparation practices have remained unchanged during this hiatus and assume all returns will be audited.