As a nod to the upcoming rules on continuing education and testing, the IRS is asking tax preparers to identify who they are and what exactly they do.
"We just completed our five year plan, here" said Wendell Hicks, executive director of the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation, an organizations whose mission is to provide compassionate medical care to people with HIV and, and to help prevent the spread of HIV through education and testing.
Continuing education and competency testing are expected to follow next year.
Enrolled Agents (EAs), Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) and attorneys are exempt from the new testing and education requirements since the IRS believes that these groups already have stringent guidelines in place.
When the IRS finally announced how paid preparers would register and who might be exempt from testing and continuing education requirements, I listened as my colleagues howled in protest.
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Under the new rules, attorneys, CPAs and enrolled agents (EAs) are exempt from the competency testing and continuing education requirements.
New requirements take effect on January 1, 2011, and include mandatory preparer tax identification numbers, continuing education, competency testing, ethical standards and electronic filing.
So the IRS dreamed up a new designation, RTRP (registered tax return preparer) which would require testing, ongoing education requirements and registration with IRS in order to prepare returns.
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Of these three, only Enrolled Agents have been subject to the direct oversight of the IRS Office of Professional Responsibility as to their return preparation practice, testing and mandatory Continuing Professional Education (CPE).
Testing is boring, and teaching to tests makes education meaningless, and creates all sorts of bad incentives.
The current testing and accountability regime does nothing to make schooling and education more self-driven or creative.
When it comes to the modern education reform movement, I am much more concerned with the testing regime and the top-down approach of many school reformers than I am with the idea of school choice.
This week the House and Senate compromised on a mushy education-reform bill that drops vouchers, increases spending and boosts the federal role in educational testing.
For over 20 years now, the Foundation has provided thousands of grants to schools and environmental organizations that promote hands-on environmental education such as gardens in schools, recycling programs, restoring wetlands, planting trees, and testing and monitoring water quality.
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The Garden State's new education commissioner, William Librera, is cutting back school testing, claiming that tests stress students and prevent teachers from employing "creative" methods.
"We are testing these ideas to see if it enhances environmental education in terms of recalling information and encourages people to change their behaviour, " she said.
And I sort of have the feeling that we're, you know, we're testing a lot of skills and a lot of data sets and looking at education that way.
The Popular Party has also put forth a controversial proposal to overhaul the public education system that would emphasize mathematics, sciences and foreign languages over other subjects and require more standardized testing.
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This focus on teachers not only turns people off to becoming teachers in the first place, it leads to a system of testing and accountability that is really anathema to a good, well-rounded education.
On education, the Bloomberg administration was among the nation's forerunners in changing the culture of public schools and testing new ideas to raise test scores and student achievement in the mayor's first two terms with then-Chancellor Joel Klein.
Proyecto Capital is testing, scaling and evaluating programs designed specifically to increase financial inclusion by linking savings and financial education to government-sponsored conditional cash transfers.
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"The GED was in dangerous position of no longer being a reflection of what high schools were graduating, " said Randy Trask, president and CEO of GED Testing Service, which previously was solely operated by the nonprofit American Council on Education.
He has been widely praised outside of New York for pushing to improve the education outcome of poor and minority students, but often sparred with unions and parent groups, particularly over his emphasis on testing.
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