New preparer randomly showing up in Lacerte?

[mgaston3]

We had a very odd Lacerte issue that I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced. We had a new preparer show up in Lacerte and none of the three people in our firm that know the primary options password had set up a new preparer. We are a CPA firm in GA and after googling the new preparer's name we found out they were from a CPA firm in WI. One of the partners in our firm called Lacerte and the only explanation Lacerte had for us was that someone in our firm may have imported a return that the WI CPA had prepared in the past. We are a small firm so it was easy to confirm that no one had imported anything. Has anyone else had this issue? We are obviously very concerned about privacy. We did confirm with our firm's tech support that no one outside the firm had breached our VPN to access our software so we are at a loss as to how this happened!

[IRonMaN]

That’s scary stuff 😱

[abctax55]

@IntuitGabiU

Any help you can provide?

[IntuitGabi]

Thanks, @mgaston3 @IRonMaN @abctax55 We'll be reaching out. 

[DAS13]

I don't have any unrecognized users in the software, but I did have an unrecognized user that appeared in the list of users when I logged into My Account, and Manage Users list. The user e-mail address was a whole string of numbers and letters, and ended in "@intuit.com"

You're right - something strange is going on.

[mgaston3]

@DAS13 This same thing happened to us as well! Lacerte's explanation was that they sometimes add users when helping with an issue. What concerned us was that they don't delete these users after they are finished! 

[mgaston3]

Hi @IntuitGabi - can you give me a call when you are able, this has happened again to us twice! I've changed our primary options password, but we would like to know why this is happening so we can prevent it from happening again. Thanks!

[IntuitGabi]

@mgaston3 I reached out to you via private message for more information. 

[mgaston3]

Bumping this up since it has now happened to us 4 times in the 2022 version of Lacerte in the past 6 months. We keep having to delete random preparers, the latest of which is named "Income Tax". If anyone else has had this issue and found a solution, please let me know!

[IRonMaN]

"If anyone else has had this issue and found a solution"

Switch to another software? 😰

[abctax55]

At the risk of being obvious - have you had your entire system/network checked out to make sure you haven't been hacked and/or infected with malware, etc?

[mgaston3]

Yes, that was our first call! 🙂 Our tech support confirmed no breach!

[abctax55]

Glad to hear that; it's one of my worst nightmares!

Hope you can get this resolved, soon.