Purjury and taxes?

Question

When you sing tax form it is with the understanding that if you file false information or purjur yourself you can be proseuted..

Since you can have 4 different tax professionals do your taxes and all will come out with a different answer and you can ask the irs for help but by thier own amission the people in the irs dont understand the codes well enough to help, than how can all of this be legal? Under the 5th amendment of the US constitution dont i have the right not to self incriminate?

Answer 1

Of course you retain your 5th Amendment rights, but that has nothing to do with falsifying tax documents. As the "owner" of the document you're signing, you're ultimately responsible for any information that's put on the return. Granted, tax law is complicated and it's easy to make mistakes. The IRS is fully aware of that, and they have no intention of sending you to prison for a simple oversight by either you or your preparer. However, if you neglect to tell your preparer about substantial amounts of income or you purposely mislead about deductions/expenses, you would be filing a fraudulent return. When you sign the return, indicating that the information is true to the best of your knowledge when any reasonable person could know it was incorrect, you've just committed perjury.

Answer 2

If it's a difference of opinion for a gray area over whether something can be deducted, it's not perjury. But if you lie about whether you spent a particular expense, or for example claimed someone else's child that you aren't entitled to claim by saying they lived with you when they didn't, then that would be perjury.