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The bottom line is your tax liability is your tax liability.
Whose fault is it if your tax advisor files your taxes incorrectly?
In most all cases, you are responsible for what is on your tax return, whether you prepared it or not. There are a lot of assumptions taxpayers often make about what their accountant, advisor, or tax preparer is or isn’t doing for them.
I have met prospective clients who believe that the accountant is on the hook if the income and expense information they provided to them is found out later to be inaccurate by the IRS. This is not accurate, if information provided is inaccurate, that is on the taxpayer to remedy.
What happens if the error was the cause of an "honest mistake?"
I know people who became victims of honest mistakes on their tax returns who were greatly surprised when the IRS still expects them to pay the correct amount, even though they didn’t make the mistake. So maybe having Crazy Uncle Joe prepare your tax returns isn’t as safe as you thought?
What should business owners and individuals know about tax liability?
The bottom line here is that your tax liability is YOUR tax liability. There most certainly can be relief from IRS penalties if the mistakes resulted from relying on bad advice (such as from a tax preparer or even the IRS), but the income tax itself will still be owed.
This also doesn’t mean you have no recourse against egregious errors or gross negligence from the accounting firm who prepared the returns. In this case however, the taxpayer still owes the IRS and must separately take legal action to try and recoup from the offending party the damages they caused.
While we are not qualified to give legal advice in any way, but for more information on tax liabilities stemming from accountant errors, the following link might be helpful.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/what-to-do-if-your-accountant-botched-your-tax-return-2018-04-05
