Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, August 8, 1993                   TAG: 9309110249
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: D2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

NO OWES BARRED

When state tax collectors started a crackdown on tax cheats, they started with something easy: looking into the tax-paying habits of certified public accountants. These, after all, are the folks who actually understand the tax code, who can add and subtract without counting on their fingers and toes, who get f+iouro tax returns in shape.

This would be like hearing confessions in a convent. What could they possibly be doing wrong?

Well ... maybe they just found a previously uncharted hole in the tax laws. The crater of all loopholes, as it were. The biggest exemption of them all: the one exempting a wage-earner from filing a return at all! The one we've all been waiting for!

For it seems that about 5 percent of the CPAs licensed in Virginia filed no state income tax returns for 1990 and/or '91. Now, these are people with W-2 forms showing fat salaries; these are people with expensive cars and big mortgages; these are people claiming less than $10,000 in annual income. Heck, these are the people we've been looking for to figure our tax liability.

Of course, there's that other bothersome possibility. It could be that they're not brilliant, and they're not dumb. It could be that they're crooks. And not filing a state return when you should could land you in jail for as much as year.

We wouldn't want that.

But tax records are protected by privacy laws, so there's really no way to find out who these guys are, much less stop them from working on other people's tax returns. Which leaves us with only one option. We're not going to any CPA who's sitting in the calaboose.