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You Don’t Like the Way I Prepared Your Return? Take Two Tylenol and Call Me in the Morning.

July 07, 2010

While the Tax Update author enjoys vacation, we are rerunning pieces your correspondent has written in other places. This post originally appeared in Going Concern -- Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

While the IRS is cracking down on tax preparers and proposing new rules to herd them into ~~submission~~ compliance, problem preparers aren’t a new problem.

Back in 1982, when the 1986 Code was just a gleam in Dan Rostenkowski’s eye, the nation’s headaches went untreated when people started dying from cyanide-tainted Tylenol. We still live with the hard-to-open containers for almost everything as a legacy of the murder spree. The killer has never been nabbed, but the tax world has supplied one suspect. The Chicago Tribune reports:

James William Lewis, a longtime suspect in the 1982 Tylenol murders, made a rare public appearance on public access television near Boston on Sunday night, hoping to promote his new self-published novel, “Poison! The Doctor’s Dilemma.”

Instead, Lewis was met with a barrage of questions from the show’s host and callers about whether he had a role in the unsolved cyanide poisonings that left seven Chicago-area residents dead, and if his novel had anything to do with the killings.

Why the suspicion?

Lewis said during the 48-minute interview that he regretted having written Tylenol’s manufacturer after the deaths, demanding $1 million to “stop the killing,” for which he was convicted of extortion.

A mistake anybody could make, especially after things have gone bad in your tax practice:

After his extortion conviction in 1983, Lewis served more than 12 years in prison. In the 1970s, Lewis was accused in Kansas City, Mo., of killing and dismembering a client of his tax-preparation business. Charges were dropped after a judge threw out most of the evidence.

That just shows how the new preparer regulations are long overdue. We can be confident that IRS Commissioner Shulman’s new preparer registration and CPE requirements — especially the two annual “ethics” hours — will keep anything like that from ever happening to a preparer today.

Tags: 2010 summer reruns.Going Concern.