IRS Makes It Easier to Look Up Disciplinary Records of Tax Practitioners

The Internal Revenue Service’s Office of Professional Responsibility has created a new online lookup table that allows the public to find out more easily if they have hired a rogue tax practitioner.

The new disciplinary look-up tool is basically just a Microsoft Excel file, but it includes searchable information about practitioners who have been censured for Circular 230 misconduct or received suspensions or disbarment from practicing before the IRS for the past 25 years.

“Currently, members of the public can only learn that a practitioner was sanctioned by reviewing each of the announcements of discipline published in the Internal Revenue Bulletin on irs.gov, or by using a commercial subscription service (such as Tax Notes Today) that reports instances of Circular 230 discipline,” said the Office of Professional Responsibility in an email Wednesday. “The OPR’s solution is to compile the information into a searchable Excel document file.”

The list includes basic information from the past 25 years on more than 3,000 censures, suspensions, disbarments and other restrictions on practitioners. Examples include permanent injunctions and denials of limited practice to unenrolled tax return preparers due to misconduct.

The IRS’s OPR plans to keep the document up to date with any new entries whenever a disciplinary announcement is published in the Internal Revenue Bulletin. The OPR will also update the information to reflect when a tax preparer has been reinstated to practice before the IRS after the end of a practitioner’s suspension or disbarment, and to remove any data related to a disciplinary sanction once the date it was imposed passes the 25-year mark for the OPR’s record retention requirement.

The list includes the last name, first name, and middle initial (if applicable) of tax practitioners, along with the city, state, designation, disciplinary sanction, effective date, and ending date (when the practitioner is now in good standing and may represent taxpayers before the Service). The spreadsheet can be searched using the “Sort & Filter” and “Find & Select” features.