South Carolina Tax Attorney

    I was recently reading an article online that listed some of the most common tax return "goof ups" that caused taxpayers problems.  Among some of those were claiming the wrong filing status, abusing or omitting your earned income credit, putting the incorrect social security number on the tax return, not reporting all of your income (see my recent post), and bad math errors.

    I know most people say to themselves, who in the world would put the mess up their social security number?  But much to your surprise, people make mistakes all the time on their tax return.  Recently, I had a client who filed head of household status when he was, in fact, married.  Therefore he did not qualify to file head of household status and had to amend his tax returns prior to the IRS considering his offer in compromise.  Luckily, we were able to get those returns fixed and save his offer in compromise.  These mistakes can cause you to owe more money than you thought and can make settling your tax liability more expensive or just more of a hassle.  I would recommend seeing a qualified tax return professional about preparing and filing your tax returns because of all of the constant changes and nuances in the tax code.

    In the coming weeks, I am writing a post in the "Do You Make These Mistakes" series asking, "do you file your own income tax returns?"  This is probably a mistake on many levels.  It’s kind of like the tax software commercial where the wife tells the husband who is "stuck" in his tax return preparation and she tells him he ought to "ask the box what to do."  The Taxgirl wrote a post about this several weeks ago with some helpful tips about finding a tax preparer.