Court: Taxpayer can’t blame mistakes on tax preparation software.
The U.S. Tax Court denied most of a taxpayer’s deductions for alimony, interest expenses, and net operating loss carryovers and rejected his attempt to avoid substantial penalties by blaming the improper deductions on software he’d used to prepare his own return. The court wasn’t persuaded by his attempt to blame software for “luring” him into claiming deductions for the two years in question and stated “software is only as good as the information one inputs into it.”