Here’s How Shady Tax Preparers Plan to Steal Your Money

Fraud among fly-by-night, seasonal tax preparers who open up shop in vacant storefronts and trailers costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year. It has prompted the IRS to seek to regulate tax preparers by requiring education courses and examinations 

Every tax season, Elmer Kilian takes out a wooden homemade shingle that says E.H. KILIAN’S TAXES and puts it out in front of his house in rural Wisconsin. The 82-year-old Korean War veteran has prepared locals’ taxes on his dining room table for the last thirty years, helping around 100 people in the town of Eagle file to the IRS, from the local grocer to the neighbor down the street. He charges $40 for a basic filing and a little extra for the frills.

Kilian is one of more than 600,000 paid tax preparers who are virtually unregulated by the IRS. Many are as scrupulous as Kilian is, but fraud among fly-by-night, seasonal tax preparers who open up shop in vacant storefronts and trailers costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year. “It’s not just one or two bad apples. It’s pervasive,” says Chi Chi Wu, an attorney for the National Consumer Law Center. “And these problems persist.”

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