A shortage of accountants means that tax preparers still doing the job can charge more, especially at the height of tax season. agshotime/Getty Images
Doing your taxes is getting ever-more expensive. The price of tax return preparation was up nearly 10% in February from this time last year, according to the Consumer Price Index released this week.
One reason tax prep is more expensive: It can be harder to find someone to do it these days. Fewer people are choosing to study accounting, per University of Texas at Austin accounting professor Lisa De Simone.
“Accounting apparently is not as sexy to our college students today as it was maybe 50 years ago,” she said.
That means those tax preparers still doing the job can charge more, especially at the height of tax season
“They require a higher fee in order to agree to do the work, because they’re already working long hours,” said De Simone.
Lots of taxpayers rely on tax software. And that’s been going up in cost, per Amy Wall, a retired tax preparer in Tucson who now teaches tax prep.
One reason is that it has to be updated every time the tax law changes. “So now, the software is changed constantly. So of course we’ve got very expensive programmers who are back there doing that,” Wall said.
There is some price shopping people can do to find the best rates, she added. But Wall recommends doing that in the summertime — not a month before tax day.
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