I’ve written several times on the trend for USA tax preparers, including some large CPA firms, to secretly farm out their tax return preparation work to much lower paid workers in India.  I even added this issue to my points to consider when selecting a tax pro.  As long as this is all disclosed to the clients, and they don’t have any problem with not being able to personally interact with their actual tax return preparer, I guess it’s okay. 

This goes completely against the very personal style of  tax prep work I do with my relatively small list of clients; but I guess it makes sense for the big impersonal assembly line operations that measure their success in quantity rather than quality.  However, when this is done covertly without the clients’ knowledge, it’s nothing less than fraud in my opinion.

As an indication that this outsourcing trend is still growing, I recently received the following email from someone promoting their service.  I haven’t independently verified his claims; but it seems that all clients and preparers need to be more open and honest in fully disclosing if they are using a sub-contracted service in India for their actual prep work.   

Subject: Help Wanted Tax Returns - I'm looking for work

My name is KC Truby; I have been a marketing and advertising consultant to accountants for over 25 years.  Four years ago I opened an office Bangalore India where we do tax returns.  

The accountants who use us (last year we did about 3,500 returns) are paying me a low of $45 for a 5 page 1040 up to $100 for a complicated corporate or partnership return of 25 pages on average. 

The 35 firms using us now are charging these returns out at 10 times to 20 times what they pay me to do them.   (We have references of course)

If you would like more details send an email to me at kctruby@msn.com  and I’ll send you an invitation for the next teleconference we do.  You’ll see exactly how this works in less then 20 minutes on documents, quality checks, security, skill set, turn around and cost.  

Thanks
KC Truby 

PS  No $5,000 minimum like Xpitax, we’ll do a test run of 10 returns so you can see how good we are for yourself.

 

Labels: preparers

- posted by Kerry M. Kerstetter, MBA~CPA~ATP~ATA @ 12/11/2007 11:11:00 AM Send this post: