Bring Out the Billy Club: IRS Threatens 19 with Loss of TPIN

The IRS announced today that it was sending letters to 19 preparers with Taxpayer Identification Numbers to revoke their licenses. According to the IRS, each of the accused either of hiding a criminal conviction or of being previous barred from tax preparation. While those accused have 20 days to respond, this cannot be good news. IRS personnel indicated that this would be the first of several enforcement actions; that they next would look at tax returns without a signature for paid preparer or those where an identification number was either neglected or misused.

For the TPIN to have credibility, especially now that the TPIN test is pushed back to 2014, the IRS had to (and now has started to) take aggressive action toward those who misacted in a tax professional capacity. Whether this justifies the TPIN or not is ultimately a personal call; this was a necessarily though not automatically sufficient action.