All tax professionals must complete annual continuing professional education requirements. The different deadlines can vary. This post discusses the stresses that can come along with completing CPE credits and how to avoid that stress.
The relatively new IRS Annual Filing Season Program (AFSP), is a necessity for tax preparers who want the opportunity to represent their clients to the IRS.
By Tim Frye
California tax preparers are required by the CTEC organization to complete twenty hours of continuing education every year to be eligible to do taxes the following tax season. If these hours are not completed by the set deadline, then the preparer will be disqualified from doing taxes in the upcoming season. The bosses at CTEC are requiring that course providers be up to standard when it comes to the overall difficulty and relevancy of their test material. So the continuing education test that will complete the required twenty hours is surely not going to get any easier, and this article will discuss the actual difficulty of the examination and its specific material.
By Tim Frye
CTEC(California Tax Education Council) is in charge of making sure tax preparers are competent and up to professional standards every year. CTEC is directing much more scrutiny on those continuing education providers that help tax preparers get their continuing education hours in order to prepare taxes every year. It seems that CTEC has noticed that many of these continuing education courses are outlined in a way that is just too easy for the tax preparers to complete. Obviously, the course provider can gain the upper hand by authoring a program that a tax preparer can fly through and complete his required hours. And this preparer will go tell his friend how simple this course was and business will be booming for this tax course provider. So there are obvious reasons why a course provider would want to make things easy for the consumer. This article will take a look at the increasingly stringent CTEC continuing education provider provisions and how they will affect the authors of these courses.
By Tim Frye
Throughout the last few years the IRS has been making determined efforts to increase tax preparation standards and regulations. When you consider the importance of the overall tax filing process to America, the tax preparation industry has been surprisingly loosely regulated,. Sixty percent of tax returns are prepared by tax preparers, so this is a large group of people who have a lot of power to distort the collection process for their client's benefits. A few years back, the commissioner of the IRS implemented the new standards for tax preparers starting with requiring all those witth PTINs to complete fifteen hours of continuing education, or be disqualified from filing returns in the upcoming season. Requirement was appealed and this provision has been overturned as of 2013, and the IRS no longer requiring tax preparers to complete any federal continuing hours whatsoever. Let's take a look at these events and the consequences this can present for current tax preparers looking to complete their required education.
By Tim Frye
As if becoming an enrolled agent wasn’t difficult enough, there are strict continuing education requirements demanded from current enrolled agents. The regular tax preparer is held to the standard twenty hours of continuing education yearly, but the enrolled agents are treated differently when it comes to continuing education. And as the IRS grows less and less lenient on tax preparers and their inadequacies, these requirements will grow stricter with the passing of time. This article will expound upon the continuing education requirements of enrolled agents and how exactly the process is to be completed.
We heard from a Pronto Tax Class Student today that she was not able to get her Preparer Tax Identificatin Number (PTIN) from the IRS website. Normally, new tax preparers are able to get their PTINs completely online at: http://www.irs.gov/taxpros/article/0,,id=210909,00.html. But now it appears that the IRS system is not processing new tax preparer PTIN applications, they are only renewing PTINs for existing tax preparers.
What is the deal, when will IRS start processing PTIN applications for new tax preparers?
Click "read more" link below to see what we've found out about this issue, also here is a link to the IRS PTIN video so you can keep in mind the overall IRS PTIN initiative:
