Taxable Talk

…You know there’s a problem. Welcome to the brave new world of signature documents.

Jason Dinesen has a post where he believes that I am wrong about the conclusions I’ve drawn on signature documents. Jason might be right or I may be correct.

What’s a fax? Is it a handwritten signature document or an electronic signature document? What’s a scan of a handwritten signature document? Consider that many tax professionals now scan every document they receive; we don’t keep paper. IRS policies allow for the keeping of scanned documents (as long as there’s a system to track them and as long as you can print them). Let’s assume that the IRS audits us and wants copies of all the “handwritten” signature documents. We print them all out. How can the IRS tell which ones were scanned and which ones were handwritten in my office? Mind you, if the IRS tells me that scanned signature documents are electronic signature documents, I’ll note that.

Jason and I reached the opposite conclusion on what this new policy means. The only way to know for sure which of is right is for the IRS to issue guidance on the questions I asked in my original post. As Jason said, “But the fact that two smart tax pros like us can have different takes on this just drives home the fact that the IRS needs to clarify this.” On that I agree completely.

Tags: efiling, IdentityTheft

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2014 at 5:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.