Company A is advertizing that their average refund is $200 more than company B’s. That was my experience, too. The first time I ever decided to have mine professionally done, I went to Company A, then to Company B ang sure 'nuff, B got me about $500 more back. How can this be? Don’t they all use the same rules & ask the same questions?
Unfortunately, no. Money Magazine does a big issue each spring rating many different tax preparers and showing the wide range of different tax returns possible with a given set of data. The discrepancies are larger depending on the complexities involved. If you just had W-2 income, interest, dividends and a mortgage, there shouldn’t be much difference between returns, but once a return gets more complicated than that differences do show up.
I used to prepare taxes professionally for a big accounting firm, and had bosses that would encourage “aggressive positions”, meaning preparing the return so that it reduced liability, even if that meant taking risky deductions. I even had guy who told me that he filed returns on an “as caught” basis. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not.
I’m guessing the bean counters had it worked out - audits are rare enough (and competent auditors rarer still) that if being agressive gets you more customers then its worth it.