of Quality Review went well; I was doing a kind of review that put me in the position of second-guessing error notices that other tax examiners (TEs) are sending to taxpayers who’ve made mistakes on their returns. I was surprised to find myself changing the notices sent twenty to thirty percent of the time; either the TE who did the work missed something, or I realized that an error he’d tagged as independent was actually what we call a “ripple” error—i.e., an error caused as a consequence of something else the taxpayer did wrong earlier in the return, or a consequence of a change the TE made to the return. Favorite candidates for ripple errors are when we have to disallow a dependent exemption or change a filing status because of an invalid dependent’s Social Security number. Get the SSN wrong, or combine the right SSN with the wrong last name, and we disallow the $3,000 exemption for that dependent, and if the disallowance removes all the valid dependents, it can even change the taxpayer’s filing status from head-of-household to single, making an additional $2,000-and-some difference to his taxable income, not to mention fouling up all kinds of credits and deductions that depend on the taxable income for their proper calculation.
Ripple errors are sometimes hard to spot unless you re-calculate the return, so over the last few weeks I’ve built myself a set of spreadsheet tools that allow me to do quick-and-dirty recalculations of various schedules and worksheets. It’s far easier to be sure that a ripple error really is a ripple when you can take the taxpayer’s original numbers, run the calculation for yourself, and see if you come up with the same answer he did. If you do, the error’s probably a ripple; if not, it needs its own taxpayer notice sent to explain why he’s not getting as much refund as he thought he would get (or sometimes why he owes us a big chunk of money when he thought he had a refund coming).
Rocky temporarily trumpets into the cold demon. Fnord.
