Leaderboard

In 2002, colleges were supposed to report amount paid for qualified education expenses. They whined that their computer systems weren't up to it so were given the option of reporting amount billed. Every time the deadline has come to eliminate the amt billed box, they whined some more that they still weren't ready. It takes supposedly the brightest among us who inhabit our institutions of higher learning FIFTEEN years to figure it out, and they had 15 years warning. Guess they knew this was an easy pass and didn't bother, or else they really don't belong in a place that teaches our young. I understand that colleges use academic years, bill for calendar year semesters, and receive parent/student/financial aid payments at different times. Sounds like an easy coding solution to me. So we beleaguered tax pros will have to spent yet another year combing through unintelligible bursar statements while the brilliant IT staffs spend their time inventing with more ways to use the student ID cards for off-campus pizza and stadium seating lotteries.

One of the things I have noticed over the years is that we as tax preparers are now required to enter data into a tax return that we were never officially trained to be experts on - health insurance, EICs, investigative fact checkers, dependent Social Security numbers, divorce issues, lifestyle changes, engagement letters, etc etc that all create a larger liability for reporting than we ever bargained for - and we become the first victims IRS and tax authorities look to should a return have an issue. And we have to rely on the reliability of third party information. Until we can control our clients' honesty and reliability of data we're given, these problems are never going to stop.