When it comes to taxes, people often have one clear goal in their minds: spend as little as possible. In order to do it, however, you have to be smart. Some ideas such as not hiring a tax professional can seem like the cheapest way at first, but this choice can turn into a nightmare.
Instead of doing your taxes on your own or asking a friend to do them, your best option is always to look for a professional. Only someone experienced will have what it takes to help you through this difficult process.
Hiring a Professional Saves Time and Money
The main reason for hiring a tax professional is pretty straightforward: they are able to do your taxes faster than you and take the problem out of your hands.
Do you know how many hours it can take you to do your own taxes if you are not really familiar with the law? Several. A professional will do it quickly and ensures you get your result in a couple of days without having to waste time.
As you know, time is money. If you think that you are saving by doing it yourself, you are plain wrong. The whole process can take you over ten hours to do it, for example, and it can easily take way more time than that with all the research involved. How about just spending a couple of hours talking to a professional instead?
Another important factor to consider is that these professionals know all the tips and hints to discounts that you would probably not even know alone. With assistance, you will end up paying less to the government as well.
Tax Laws Can be Complicated
If you want to do your taxes without help, you will have to go straight to the laws. Unfortunately, they can be difficult to understand.
The law was not exactly devised to be understood by people who are not lawyers. Not onl is the language used in law documents hard to understand, but taxes are far from straightforward. They are a social instrument that was devised to do more than just take a chunk of your money. Taxes have the responsibility of rewarding and promoting certain behaviors and to address inequality.
Poorer people, for instance, will receive discounts and benefits when compared to richer individuals. Investing in education and savings accounts is also seen as something positive by the government. In order to make this complex logic work, you need several complex laws and they can be overwhelming for normal people.
There are many differences in taxes between states, too. It is an error to consider only the federal law when you are doing your taxes. This adds another layer of complexity to the problem.
The Law is Subject to Constant Changes
Tax laws were subject to several changes back in 2018. This means that your experience may confuse you more than help you now. What’s even worse is that these changes are pretty common.
Some of the recent changes included the restructuring of tax brackets, tweaks in mortgage interest rates, medical expenses and charitable contributions, how inflation is now calculated differently, among others.
For instance, moving expenses, theft and casualty losses, tax preparation expenses and even unreimbursed employee expenses are all gone. These small and large tweaks in the law make it very hard for someone who only thinks about taxes once a year to keep up with all the changes.
A Tax Professional Will Solve Your Doubts
As the specific legislation is pretty hard and it keeps changing, you probably have a lot of doubts, right? A tax professional can help you with them. It’s their job to answer all your questions and to guide through the most painless way of doing your taxes.
Their assistance is basically a requirement in some cases, too. There are people who have very specific needs and doubts due to a unique situation. If you fit in this profile, you should not think twice before hiring a pro.
Assistance Will Help You to Avoid Common Mistakes
The real reason for all this effort is to avoid mistakes. The complexity of the law, its constant changes and unfamiliarity with doing your taxes alone can lead to several small but important common mistakes.
For instance, it is not uncommon to see people using an incorrect filing status or doing it too late. Without actual certainty, you are bound to make assumptions. If you are not 100% sure about how to move one, the probability of doing your taxes wrong is big.
While these errors are not visible to you, sometimes they can be glaring to the Internal Revenue System (IRS), so you have to be extra careful when doing your taxes alone.
Mistakes can be Expensive and Dangerous
You may have already noticed, but most of the reasons to hire a tax professional are listed in order to let people avoid the largest problem: mistakes that can be very expensive. The IRS can impose hefty penalties if it believes that someone lied or made an important error.
These problems are often discovered and then confirmed via audits. It is true that audits are not very common, but they can be a trouble if you do not have a professional to advise you.
Hiring someone after the mistake has been done, though, will only patch up the issues. Having someone that you can trust right from the start is obviously the better alternative.
The government doesn’t care whether you made a mistake because you didn’t know better, it wants you to pay your taxes correctly, so that’s what you should really do if you want to avoid any headache.
Claudia Grant
