The professional tax preparation market needs regulation because of the errors being made by a significant proportion of those preparing taxes, according to representatives from state and federal bodies in a panel discussion at this week's IRS Public Forum on Tax Return Preparer Review.

"Unqualified or unethical tax return preparers can cause enormous damage to the Federal tax system, to taxpayers and to the tax preparer community as a whole," was the prepared statement of Michael Mckenney, assistant inspector general for audit  and
treasury inspector general for tax administration. 

It was interesting, and unexpected, when the three top players in professional tax preparation decided that this year is the time to make a bigger noise about online professional tax preparation.

In fact, it was very unexpected that at the Illinois CPA Society's Midwest Accounting and Financial Showcase that both Intuit and CCH would make announcements. Intuit had been making announcements on the order of Hansel and Gretel dropping bread crumbs to mark a trail.

But CCH decided this year it was the place to talk about the delivery schedule of its online version of ProSystem fx Tax, along with other applications. These moves are detailed in "Online Tax: the Future Is Now?" in this issue. Call it what you want - Software-as-a-Software service, ASP (I like the simple Internet-based myself)- the fact that CCH, Thomson Reuters and Intuit have all put their plans on the table means they've decided that acceptance of online applications has gotten to the point, it's worth try to sell them more aggressively.

Professionals in public accounting firms are probably not first on the list when most business people consider the purchase of point-of-sale systems, the combination of hardware and software technology that helps retailers accept payment from customers.

But when they are participants in the Sage Accountants' Network, it's another story, says Jeff Rosengarden, CEO of Hightower, a large Sage reseller that also sells its own Point of Sale Professional, a POS module for Sage's MAS 90 and 200 packages. Hightower has marketed the package since it was acquired from Sage several years ago.