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I am Shulman, Creator of Professions

May 11, 2010

From Tax Notes ($link):

"We are about, essentially, to create a new profession out there," said Karen Hawkins, director of the IRS Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), during an Administrative Practice section program discussion at the American Bar Association Section of Taxation meeting in Washington.

Because you don't have a profession until you find a way to use it create a new regulatory bureaucracy with dependent class of docile clients protected from low-price competition.

The IRS will soon embark on the first phase of a public education campaign regarding the return preparer registration requirements, Hawkins said. Eventually, the burden will be on taxpayers to make informed consumer decisions about the preparers they hire. It is possible that at some point taxpayers could become partly responsible for preparer mistakes if they fail to use registered preparers, she mused.

Interesting. Taxpayers are supposed to be responsible for their returns now. Will they get a "get out of penalties free" card when they go to H&R Block? Maybe that's somewhere in the preparer regulation rules the former H&R CEO wrote.