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According to The Economist (May 13th, 2017, print edition, webpage),

America has more tax preparers—over 1m, according to a project at George Washington University—than it has police and firefighters combined.

Is this true?

jwodder
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    How is a tax preparer defined? I do my own taxes: does that make me one? – jamesqf May 17 '17 at 06:10
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    Something worth noting: "In 2008, state and local law enforcement agencies employed more than 1.1 million people on a full-time basis, including about 765,000 sworn personnel"- Wikipedia. – PointlessSpike May 17 '17 at 06:52
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    Addendum: "As of 2014, there were 1,134,400 firefighters in the United States (not including firefighters who work for the state or federal governments or in private fire departments)."- Wikipedia – PointlessSpike May 17 '17 at 06:54
  • @PointlessSpike Where is that number of firefighters sourced to? [Bureau of Labor Statistics gives 310,400](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/Protective-Service/Firefighters.htm). – gerrit May 17 '17 at 09:34
  • @gerrit- "Of those firefighters, 31% or 346,150 were career firefighters" could be your stat doesn't count volunteers, who make up 69% of the number I gave. – PointlessSpike May 17 '17 at 09:36
  • @gerrit- It's sourced here: https://apps.usfa.fema.gov/registry/summary – PointlessSpike May 17 '17 at 09:37
  • @PointlessSpike I see. That is almost consistent with the number 310,400 given by BLS, considering only professionals. With the slightly higher FEMA estimate the number of tax preparers equals police + firefighters. – gerrit May 17 '17 at 09:38
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    It's worth noting that the US has more tax*payers* than criminals and fires. – phoog May 17 '17 at 17:36
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    I fail to see the utility in the comparison. Seems as useful as comparing the number of cat videos online to tax preparers, which fortunately is so obvious that nobody has to waste their time creating definitions, gather data, or confirm sources. – aaaaaa May 17 '17 at 21:43
  • @phoog Depends if you count speeding as a crime... – TylerH May 18 '17 at 15:08
  • @aaaaaa My understanding is that the point of the claim was to demonstrate the scale of the number of tax preparers. Assuming the 1.2 million number in gerrit's answer is accurate, another way to demonstrate the scale would be to say that, for every 128 employed people in the U.S. workforce, 1 of them is a tax preparer. – reirab May 18 '17 at 15:32
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    I *hope* for you that you suffer from crime and fire much less often than from taxes. – Hagen von Eitzen May 19 '17 at 16:44
  • @TylerH Sorry, but there are still more taxpayers than there are criminals, speeders, and fires combined. – Michael May 19 '17 at 18:22
  • @Michael I dunno, considering every tax payer has probably gone over the speed limit before, that's probably not true. – TylerH May 19 '17 at 18:26

2 Answers2

107

No

As per the statistics that @gerrit cited, the statement as listed is untrue. There are almost as many firefighters alone as tax preparers.

There is a true way of stating it. If we explicitly limit to just full time paid fire fighters and law enforcement professionals, then there are more tax preparers. However, this is a fundamentally unfair way of counting. If we are going to limit fire fighters to just the full time paid members, we should also limit the tax preparers in the same way. Many tax preparers are themselves part time. They work just for the few months after W-2 and 1099 forms are issued and before 1040 forms are due.

If we limited just to professional, full-time tax preparers, there are only about 70,000 as per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To get the larger number, we have to include seasonal tax-preparers and accountants/auditors who fill out tax returns. So there are fewer career tax preparers than there are career fire fighters or law enforcement professionals separately, much less added together.

Regardless, the Economist's formulation is incorrect. As written, the statement would include volunteer firefighters and paid-per-call firefighters. But including them means that there are about as many firefighters alone as tax preparers, even including seasonal workers and people whose profession is listed as accountant or auditor.

Brythan
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    +1 for pointing out that vast majority of tax preparers are part-time and seasonal – antlersoft May 17 '17 at 15:15
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    I wonder if there would be any way to compare full-time equivalents? – Nate Eldredge May 17 '17 at 17:07
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    One could argue if one was was going to include volunteer firefighters who receive no compensation one should also include all people who help family or friends prepare taxes without compensation. Which I suspect is a lot. I suppose I am saying, could this claim be true if one includes persons part or full time but who are paid? – Vality May 17 '17 at 17:30
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    @Vality That would lead to even more problems as the term volunteer firefighter covers a wide range of people. Some are purely volunteers, some are volunteers who are reimbursed, some are paid part time, some are paid on-call. Also they're trained to career firefighter standards so comparing them to a friend who helps you do taxes is a little disingenuous. – JonK May 17 '17 at 20:29
  • Wonder how man people know that non-career firefighters protect well over the majority of the land. – Mad Myche May 17 '17 at 22:07
  • Maybe a good measure would be to name the number of months in a year where Tax preparers outnumber firefighters, and if this number is >= 1 for any month of the year, tell the scale. – antipattern May 17 '17 at 22:43
  • Humm... The IRS says there were about 239 million tax returns filed, of which 139 million were personal (presumably the rest are corporate). Given that 51 million prepared and efiled (and some did hard copy), it's hard to see how over a million tax preparers could be making a living. – jamesqf May 18 '17 at 04:23
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    @jamesqf Because some people's taxes practically require a full-time accountant by themselves... and that's to say nothing of large corporations (which only count as one 'taxpayer,' but may have dozens or even hundreds or more people working on their taxes.) – reirab May 18 '17 at 15:01
  • @MadMyche I would guess most would be, if not aware, unsurprised to learn it. Volunteer fire departments are common in less-densely-populated areas, and I’d think most people would be aware that “less-densely-populated” describes more of America’s area than it doesn’t. Putting 2 and 2 together there leads to the fairly intuitive conclusion that most of the land area is covered by non-career firefighters. Maybe there’d be some thought given to forests and forest-fire fighters, but most media coverage of forest fires emphasizes how the fire fighters are brought in for those events. – KRyan May 18 '17 at 15:11
  • @reirab: I'd guess that the number of individuals needing full-time tax preparers is pretty small. (Though I say this as someone who one year did about 20 pages of federal taxes, plus California non-resident and Swiss taxes.) As for corporate taxes, are people doing those classified as "tax preparers" or "corporate accountants"? – jamesqf May 19 '17 at 18:25
  • @jamesqf As this answer mentions, the "over a million" number you were referring to includes accountants who fill out tax forms, so, to answer your question, I'd assume they fall under the definition of both "tax preparers" and "corporate accountants" for the purpose of these numbers. – reirab May 19 '17 at 19:31
  • @reirab: It seems that the claim is using misleading definitions, then. If an accountant who among other duties fills out his/her corporate employer's tax return, then any individual taxpayer who does his/her own returns is one also. And I'm a firefighter because I doused my GF's car when it caught fire one morning :-) – jamesqf May 20 '17 at 04:44
  • @jamesqf Eh, in the case of corporate accountants, though, it can actually represent quite a large part of their job description. It is a large part of what they do professionally, even if it's not the entirety of their job. I do agree, though, that using something more along the lines of "full-time job equivalents" for both the tax preparers and the firefighters would provide a more meaningful comparison. – reirab May 20 '17 at 05:10
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True, almost true, or false, depending on sources and interpretation.

Depending on sources, the number of professional firefighters + law enforcement officers is either the same or slightly smaller than the number of professional tax preparers. However, if we include part-time or amateur firefighters, the claim is false.

From Face the Facts USA, A Project of the George Washington University, comes the claim with sources (see below). Evidently, they define tax preparers as those who make a living helping taxpayers deciphering US tax code. Likewise, the number only considers professional firefighters.

Note that this is not peer-reviewed research, but rather has the nature of a blog, even though it's run by a university, it should be considered with some care. However, all the numbers are directly sourced to the U.S. Federal Government.

Up to 1.2 million tax preparers make a living deciphering the labyrinth U.S. tax code for taxpayers. We have more professional tax preparers in the United States than law enforcement officers (765,000) and professional firefighters (310,400) combined.

(...)

Sources:
Internal Revenue Service: “Return Preparer Review Leads to Recommendations For New Requirements of Paid Tax Return Preparers”

Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: “Firefighters”

US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics: “Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, 2008”

However, FEMA give a higher estimate of firefighters:

  • Registered fire departments are staffed by approximately 1,217,000 personnel. This includes career, volunteer and paid per call firefighters as well as civilian staff and nonfirefighting personnel.
  • There were a total of 1,065,700 active career, volunteer and paid per call firefighters representing nearly 88 percent of the registered departments' personnel.
  • Of the active firefighting personnel, 33 percent were career firefighters, 55 percent were volunteer firefighters, and 12 percent were paid per call firefighters.

…this would put the total number of active career firefighters at 0.33*1,065,700 = 351,860. Adding this number to the number of law enforcement officers puts law enforcement + firefighters at the same level.

I don't think the number of amateur tax preparers can be reasonably defined, let alone accurately measured.

In conclusion, depending on what federal agency one sources information to, the number of professional firefighters + law enforcement officers is either the same as the number of professional tax preparers, or it may be slightly smaller.

gerrit
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    Note the term "professional" is very important to this answer, but the term is not mentioned anywhere in the original claim. – Beofett May 17 '17 at 17:57
  • @Beofett True. Adapted to emphasise that. – gerrit May 17 '17 at 17:59
  • So GWU's numbers are omitting federal law enforcement( FBI, DEA, Military) in their numbers, Can't tell if they are skipping that on that for firefighters. I wonder what percentage of these "tax prepares" subsist soley on this year round. – Mad Myche May 17 '17 at 22:04
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    What about amateur tax preparers? – Paŭlo Ebermann May 18 '17 at 19:18
  • @PaŭloEbermann I don't think we can reasonably define/measure those; see comment. – gerrit May 19 '17 at 11:56