2026-06-25
If I were a US citizen living in a foreign country and I had a moderately complicated US tax return, I would want a US tax preparer with some experience. In particular, I would want them to be familiar with the peculiarities of the country I was living in. Ideally, they would live in the same country. Perhaps I would want them to prepare at least 50 US tax returns, but not a huge company --- perhaps not preparing more than 800 tax returns. I would also want to know that they had consistently prepared roughly the same number of US tax returns for at least the past few years.
Fortunately, on Tuesday of this week the IRS released a file that contains all of the tax return preparers who e-file returns. The list includes the number of returns each preparer filed for 2023, 2024, and year-to-date for 2025. I filtered the data to only include preparers based outside the US who prepared at least 50 US tax returns for each of 2023 and 2024, but not more than 800 returns for either of those years. I also limited the list to preparers whose business was not hugely increasing or decreasing. The 472 preparers who met these conditions are included in my filtered list of overseas tax preparers.
The IRS file can be found here (a 37MB zip file that is 157MB unzipped). The file is in a CSV format, but it has a TXT extension. You can open the file in Excel (I changed the extension to CSV first).