While this is always a great new source of business (???), the potential disasters of helping a new client revise previous years’ returns are usually a latent minefield (plus the hovering potential audit risk.) See this article in AccountingToday by Jeff Stimpson for some stories, mis-comunications, outright mistakes and the problems that come from them:

http://www.accountingtoday.com/news/tax_news/past-imperfect-fixing-previous-preparers-goofs-71120-1.html

The big conflict in this is the feeling of wanting to help your new client vs. the feeling of wanting to run and hide. Even after the review of these returns it is so easy to underestimate the time it will take to correct old returns that many times this service ends up being a pro-bono undertaking.

For financial, accounting and tax musings,