taxxcpa

All of the ATX users obviously prefer ATX or they would switch. I left ATX after it changed ownership and they got rid of William Tasker and shut down their user forum before the end of the tax season. Although they may have improved it, the updates did not install automatically, and sometimes I would do a return, but have a delay in receiving the signed Form 8879, and when I got it the e-filing would get rejected because of an update I had not installed. I liked most of the features of ATX. At one time I had to do CA sales tax returns which only ATX offers as far as I know. I switched to Drake which has an excellent forum and undoubtedly the best customer service in the business. There is now a "forms-based" entry mode for Form 1040 returns, which I use if I can't remember a form number. The biggest complaint I've heard about Drake is its handling of Ohio city returns. Drake provides for e-filing of all type returns including 940s, 941s, 1099s and W-2s. It also has a write-up program which is very poor for write-up work, but great for payroll work and preparation of quarterly payroll taxes. Drake can be set to automatically send Form 9325 to your clients from an e-mail at a 1040.com e-mail address Drake provides you. The biggest problem with getting used to Drake are the input screens, but if you use the Forms-based input, that solves the problem. Another thing Drake offers is Macros . I can click ALT-P and it automatically generate a PIN for the tax preparer, the taxpayer and the spouse. Clicking my ALT-I macro triggers a maco that checks all the boxes indicating "no foreign interest." You can even create a macro to check all the boxes on Form 8879 for the EIC. I have some macos that do several things all at once like entering the PINs, "no foreign interest' and any other information common to most returns. ATX and Drake are probably the two best choices unless you have a large enough practice to justify a program costing several times as much.

The only way to end EIC fraud is to end the EIC.

I read something that said that the splitting gimmick was used to enable fraud.

I noticed it today. My bookmark would not work I had to delete everything after the dot-com in the web address before I could access the forum.

I always vote early and often.

What would be the arrangement for this? Would the CPA/EAs be paid for these audits? Would we be "deputized" or just barge in and say "I want to audit you?" Would I have to have a peer review by my State Board if I did these audits? I believe what you suggest would be a way to identify the "ghost" preparers, but very few CPAs or EAs would want to do this sort of thing. It would be very unpleasant having to deal with these "ghosts" and you could be sticking your neck out if your audit was "substandard" and did not catch something that later showed up. Once I performed an audit and thought everything was OK. Later the same company came up for audit again, and I was assigned again. This time I found all kinds of errors, but had somehow selected a sample on the first audit that was error-free. If someone else had done the second audit, it would have been hard for me to say it was just the luck of the draw. If I hadn't felt pretty secure in my job, I might have been tempted to cover it up, but I let the chips fall where they fell and reported all of the errors.

There was a song that had a line about "when soda pop was just a nickel," and Pepsi Cola used to advertize their 12 oz Pepsi as "twice as much for a nickel too." The current price of coca cola and pepsi cola is a good example of how we have cheapened the purchasing power of the dollar. A barrel of oil was $3.00 for many years. Now it is $80 or more. Natural gas used to be 10¢ an MCF and there was no adjustment for higher or lower BTU content. A gallon of gasoline used to be 30¢. Inflation really took off a little after the Secretary of the Treasury said we would never go off the gold standard--and we didn't for a month or two after he made that statement.

It is not practicing law if you fill it out for your own corporation. If you fill it out for a client, then you might be guilty of paracticing law without a license. I've done it several years ago for clients, but I wouldn't do it again.

A more likely plan: print all the money it takes to pay off the national debt.

I used the following from the Drake Forum: Atticus, I think I figured it out! Spent the past 30 minutes on the phone with the IRS to waste time figuring out name controls, when they were just the first four letters of the company name. Anyways, the jist is to go into the Client Info, EF Setup. Fill in the information on the right side, save, and then click "Create PIN". Then go to transmit these PINS to Drake, which then transmits it to the IRS. Taxpayer will be notified with a 10 digit PIN. Notify them that you need this (though they probably will if it is something from the IRS). Get the PIN, plug it in there, and you should be able to e-file the 94x series forms. Just created the PIN and transmitted. Even if it doesn't take place until January, not a big worry for me.

It may be best to set up two corporations. I have one client who has two similar businesses and I keep a set of books for each of the, but it is only one corporation. I combine the two sets of books in order to file the tax return. I have another client that has three businesses and two corporations. He keeps two of the businesses that are in a single corporation on just one set of books. It boils down to selecting what your preference is (or your client's preference).

You can also file as an ERO. All it takes is the signature of the client. If you have several clients you would need to get separate forms signed by each. The client needs to send the form to the IRS, get an ID number and give you the letter the IRS sends with the number. I had a lot of trouble getting my request to e-file transmitted. The clock on my calendar was in the 1/1/12 format rather than the 01/01/2012 format. I changed it and it worked. If you have a lot of 941s to file, then you need an EI number and send the form to become a reporting agent.

They used to say, "As Maine goes, so goes the nation". Later it became so unpredictive, that they changed it fo "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont." Ohio has been on the winning side a lot, but that too will probably change in this election or in some future election.

Do you really believe that recaptured depreciation is UBIT when the MLP itself has no UBIT at all ? My understanding is that UBIT is due to leveraging done by MLPs which means that a portion of their income relates to debt as a percentage of income and is considered UBIT. Since you are not allowed to borrow within an IRA any income related to borrowing is taxed as UBIT. An MLP with no debt would have no UBIT to report on line 20V of the K-1. But if recaptured depreciation creates UBIT at the investor level for a MLP with no UBIT, then I would like to know where, in the tax laws, this ls stated.

You need to know basic math to write an excel program, which includes knowing how to insert parentheses when appropriate. But if you want to raise something to the 9th power, you just enter 5^9 or if you want to know the 9th root of a number, you just enter 95^-9. I could do the first example manually, but I have no idea how to calculate the 9th root of a number without a computer. I might be able to do it with logarithms but I would have to re-familiarize myself with logarithms to do it. Generally, doing taxes and most other accounting work involves mostly simple grade-school level arithmetic. Knowing the tax laws is also important, but knowing how to look up the tax rules is even more important than memorizing them all. Online CPE courses that dwell on memorizing the amount of exemptions, standard deductions, form numbers, code section numbers do almost nothing to enhance your ability to do tax returns. Neither would getting a phd in math. I used to have a client that had a phd in math. His understanding of taxes was very small.

Here is a link to an article which I believe incorrectly equates recaptured depreciation with UBIT http://boards.fool.com/mlp-ubti-held-in-an-ira-question-30045012.aspx?sort=postdate If I have an investment in a LLC in my IRA and it has negative UBIT; e.g. LINE Energy, and my capital account is decreased by depreciation, I would then have a low basis. If I sell it in my IRA, I do not think I would have UBIT unless I sold it in some future date when the UBIT was a positive amount for ALL investors. According to the Motley Fool, however, even if all people who still own LINE have negative UBIT, the sale within an IRA would generate UBIT subject to tax within the IRA. Does anyone know about this?

Do you think you need to know calculus, trigonometry and geometry to do taxes. I can do any necessary calculation using excel by just knowing how to use parentheses and a few things about excel. Even the complicated calculations shown in publication 1212 for OID can be done without knowledge of advanced math if you can work with excel

I'm willing to agree that the correct answer is 20. Presenting the problem without parentheses was designed to confuse. When I create a formula, I do it in excel and could not do it correctly if I assumed that excel knew where to put the parentheses if I left them off. The University of Texas requires you to take calculus for a business degree. I once expressed the thought that this was something very few if any business majors needed. The guy I made this comment to had majored in engineering and said that he had to take calculus, but even as an engineer he never used it. Of course, I'm sure a lot more engineers would need it than people in most business-related occupations. The main thing I've found useful beyond simple arithmetic is understanding how to work a computer and a calculator. When I took the CPA test, I had to do all of the calculations by hand which seemed to place too much focus on something other than accounting knowledge. Once I heard a math teacher who thought carpenters needed to know geometry, although they have done their work effectively without learning the geometric rules underlying what they manage to do.

I would agree that it is improper. However, I had a client that did it that way, so I put the 1099 income on schedule C. The result was the same as if it had been done properly--same SE tax and same total income.

If you just enter the figures in a calculator without using any parentheses you will get 320. Broken down it comes to: 4x4=16 16x4=20 20x4=80 80+4= 84 84-4=80 80x4=320 If the rules of math stipulate that parentheses are to be assumed as mentioned, then the answer would be 16. I've always worked with parentheses that are shown, not assumed.

If you enter each number on a calculator enter and the X or + exactly as it is written, including the minus sign in front of the penultimate "4", you will get 320 as the answer If you were to treat it as (4X4) + (4X4) + (4-4) X 4, you get a whole 'nother answer which would be incorrect for the problem as presented.

All Romney did was pay what he owed under existing tax laws, so if he got off too easy, it is the fault of the tax laws, not his fault. Are people actually making their decision on who to vote for based on the candidate's tax bracket. Some people make it sound like the best way to vote is to vote for the guy who pays the highest tax rate. That would be some self-employed person who makes about the amount of the social security maximum and pays something like 25% income tax and 13.3% social security and has no dividends, capital gains or other tax-favored sources of income and gets no tax credits.

[ Maybe that $100 million should also be exempt from tax. Maybe great athletes should be exempt from all taxes for life..

I can see not taxing the medal itself. The value would not be all that significant and it would not be something you would sell.

I see no more reason why the income of a great athlete should be treated any different than a great ditch-digger or a great tax preparer. Is the Nobel prize exempted from tax? Of course, the government made it happen so maybe they should pay a surtax.