Important 2012 Changes to the CTEC Re-Registration Process if Your CTEC Registration Has Been “Archived”

For 2012, we have witnessed an important change to the process of the California Tax Education Council (CTEC) with regard to CTEC-registered tax preparers whose registration has been “archived” (a.k.a. expired) due to the lack of completion of the 20 hour CTEC continuing education requirement. For instance, let’s say that you were registered as a tax preparer with CTEC for the 2010 fiscal year, but then you did not complete a 20 hour course for 2011, or perhaps your education provider did not report your 20 hours properly to CTEC.

In these situations, CTEC will “archive” the tax preparer registration, meaning that the tax preparer is no longer actually registered with CTEC.

A tax preparer who is not registered with CTEC can face fines from $2,500-$5,000 per tax return prepared without CTEC registration, so this is certainly a very serious issue if your CTEC registration has expired and you are still doing taxes for pay in California. Believe it or not, we have had quite a few calls over the past year on our CTEC phone hotline 310-422-1283 from RenewCTEC.com students who were not aware that their CTEC registration had expired. Unfortunately, many preparers may be operating with expired CTEC registration without their knowledge.

Yikes!