Tax season is stressful enough. You hired a pro, handed over your documents, signed on the dotted line, and exhaled. Done, right? Not necessarily. What if your preparer never hit “send”? What if the IRS rejected the filing and your preparer never noticed? You would assume that is their problem. You did your part. But the law says otherwise—and the penalty lands on you.
A Bright-Line Rule Born in the Mailroom
Forty years ago, in United States v. Boyle, 469 U.S. 241 (1985), the Supreme Court drew a hard line: taxpayers are personally responsible for getting their returns filed on time, no exceptions. You cannot delegate that duty to a tax professional and then claim ignorance when things go sideways. In Boyle, an executor hired an attorney to manage his late mother’s estate, including filing the estate tax return. The attorney dropped the ball. The Supreme Court did not care. The executor bore the consequences, not the attorney.
The logic made some sense in 1985. Back then, a taxpayer could physically hold the return, stuff it in an envelope, and drive it to the post office. The taxpayer had control. But does that logic still hold in a world where your accountant files your return from a computer screen you never see?
Enter the E-Filing Era—Same Rule, New Problems
Today, roughly half of all Americans rely on a tax professional to prepare and electronically file their returns. The IRS has spent years pushing taxpayers toward e-filing and has even tried—with limited success—to offer free e-filing software. When a return is e-filed, the taxpayer never signs the return itself. Instead, taxpayers sign Form 8879, which authorizes an Electronic Return Originator (ERO) to transmit the return to the IRS. But here is the catch: signing that form does not mean your return has been filed. It just means you gave someone else permission to file it.
And if that someone else fails to follow through? You are still on the hook.
New Technology, No Sympathy: The Eleventh Circuit Weighs In
Much like a parent who is on the hook when their kid spends hundreds of dollars on in-app purchases, the Eleventh Circuit held that taxpayers are responsible for their preparer’s tech missteps—even ones they had no way of preventing. In Lee v. United States, 84 F.4th 1271 (11th Cir. 2023), the Eleventh Circuit confronted the question of whether Boyle survives in the e-filing era—and delivered a resounding yes. It does not matter that the return preparer in Lee was legally required to file electronically because he handled more than ten returns per year. It does not matter that there was no paper return for the taxpayer to drop in the mail. It does not matter that the taxpayer reviewed and signed the Form 8879 before the deadline. None of it was enough. As the court put it: “[t]he Supreme Court’s authoritative construction of Section 6651(a)(1) is Boyle, which applies to e-filed returns just as much as it applies to paper-filed returns.” Id. at 1279.
In other words, even in a system designed so that only your preparer can press the button, you are responsible when the button does not get pressed.
Even the Court Knows This Is a Problem
In a notable concurrence, Judge Lagoa acknowledged the uncomfortable truth: the e-filing era is riddled with traps for unsuspecting taxpayers. While the court recognized the IRS’s strong preference for electronic filing, Judge Lagoa suggested that some taxpayers might actually be better off filing on paper—just to maintain personal control over the process. The court also floated the idea that taxpayers could call the IRS to confirm their returns were received. Picture that: over 80 million Americans who use return preparers, all calling the IRS on April 15th to ask, “Did my return actually go through?” The IRS phone system can barely handle existing call volume as it is.
A Bright-Line Rule with Real-World Consequences
On paper, Boyle offers a clean, easy-to-apply rule. In practice, it demands something close to absurd: that ordinary taxpayers supervise specialists in a field they themselves may not fully understand. The tax code is thousands of pages long. The IRS’s own instructions are notoriously complex. Millions of Americans hire professionals precisely because they cannot navigate the system on their own. And yet the law tells those same taxpayers, “You should have been watching your accountant more closely.”
The irony cuts deeper when you consider what Boyle means for the IRS itself. If taxpayers truly cannot rely on their accountants to e-file, the rational response is to file on paper as a backup—forcing the IRS to double-process returns, once electronically and once by hand. That is hardly the streamlined, digital-first system the agency has been building toward.
So What Can Be Done?
Relief may ultimately have to come from Congress. One straightforward fix would be to amend the law so that a timely signed Form 8879 constitutes reasonable cause for late filing when the preparer fails to transmit the return. Alternatively, the IRS could accomplish the same result through an administrative waiver, without waiting for legislation. And here is another thought: the IRS could simply update its systems so that taxpayers can track the status of their filed returns the way they track a package from Amazon. The technology exists. The question is whether the will does.
In the meantime, taxpayers need to protect themselves. That means asking your preparer for a copy of the IRS confirmation email showing that your return was accepted—not just prepared, not just authorized, but actually received. Do not assume. Verify.
The Bottom Line
Boyle was decided in a different era, for a different filing system. Yet it remains the law of the land, applied rigidly to a process that looks nothing like the one the Supreme Court originally contemplated. The result is a system that punishes taxpayers for trusting the very professionals the system practically requires them to use. As the tax world continues to evolve, the question is no longer whether Boyle is outdated—it is how much longer we can pretend it is not.
