We were having issues with duplicate tags, one having an inadvertant space. To fix this we edited /administrator/components/com_k2/models/item.php
We changed line 579 to:
$tag = str_replace('-','',$tag);
// MMJ hack removes leading and trailing and double spaces before checking to see if tag already exists
$pat[0] = "/^\s+/";
$pat[1] = "/\s{2,}/";
$pat[2] = "/\s+\$/";
$rep[0] = "";
$rep[1] = " ";
$rep[2] = "";
$tag = preg_replace($pat,$rep,$tag);
$tag = strtolower ($tag);
Suit your self if you want the last line, which forces tags to be lowercase. We are using k2 2.4.1