When a real estate investor came to us for help, the first thing we did was review his personal tax return.

At first glance, things didn't see too out of place, until we started tracing back where the numbers came from. This is where our forensic skills really came in handy.

When comparing the line items on his return to the business entity returns, we noticed something was off.

The K-1 from his business showed $22,000 of income to him.

But when looking at his personal return, it showed $220,000 of income to him.

We checked and rechecked several times because this was such a blatant error, we thought for sure it was us who was missing something here.

Nope. It was simply a typo.

A typo that added an extra $200,000 of income to his return, caused over $100,000 is taxes and forced him to sell some assets to come up with the money to pay these extra taxes.

We quickly amended the federal and state returns and got checks back for $76,547 and $22,934 plus interest from the IRS and the Franchise Tax Board.

It was a great day for him! (and for us too!)