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Last night after this post was updated I started looking at the differences in Win 10 compared to earlier versions and noticed that it doesn't include any software or drivers to run any floppy drives or CD/DVD drives, so if you want a machine with anything other than a hard drive, have any software that still updates on CD on DVD, or have anything stored on that type of media, you'll have to purchase add-on software to run a drive. More and more things will be moving to cloud-based software.

I don't have any plans to upgrade any current device either. Why mess with a machine that is working perfectly now? The upgrade offer begins on 7/29/15 and will be available for one year until 7/29/16. If a person accepts the free offer, it is free forever on that device. The person would not be required to pay for it after that time. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-faq?ocid=win10_auxapp_context What are the basic facts of the Windows 10 upgrade?Microsoft is making Windows 10 available as free upgrade for qualified Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1 devices. It will be available starting July 29, 2015; people can reserve their free upgrade today. You only have until July 29, 2016 to take advantage of this offer. Once you upgrade, you have Windows 10 for free on that device.

Goodness, what an update. I'm glad you, your husband, and cousin are all doing well and are getting back to good health.

http://www.irs.gov/Tax-Professionals/e-File-Providers-&-Partners/Benefits-of-1040-Modernized-e-File Some benefits of filing through MeF are: Year Round Filing – Returns filed through MeF can be submitted year round.Prior Year Returns – MeF allows filing of prior year 1040 returns. As a new tax form type is added to the MeF platform, tax returns will be accepted for the current tax year only. As subsequent tax years are added to the system, MeF will accept the current tax year and two prior tax years. You can find additional information on Modernized e-File on the MeF Overview Page, which includes information and links on: design historyprocessing of returnscommunication between IRS and transmitters during the e-file processapproval of tax preparation softwaresecurity during transmission

Once you are no longer considered a current customer of ATX, you can't connect to the ATX server for efiling or for updating of the program and forms. I really doubt it was received by the ATX server or was ever transmitted to IRS. Didn't the software give some warning that it couldn't connect to ATX? Former customers are still able to use the prior year programs that are on their computers to prepare prior year returns that can be paper filed and for paper filed amendments.

Sorry, I can't help or answer further. The states I generally work with don't even have that third party authorization box. DE would accept the Fed box, and pretty sure PA would want a POA. DE doesn't even have it's own POA form. DE piggybacks the Fed laws and forms on just about everything, and for a POA specific for a DE-only issue, we file a Fed 2848 with the state with the specific DE forms and years indicated in the appropriate box.

Oh, did people like the scolding of Soup Nazi better? I was going for a softer image. Maybe I should have gone with a picture of one of my roses, you know, with the prickly thorns on the stem.

Perhaps ATX has a schema error that's causing the entry in that field to not be included in the transmitted e-file.

Gail and MsTabbyKats, I looked at those links, and like Gail, I also could not find anything and agree with Gail about the employee being required to minimize their tax liability by means of all allowable adjustments to income, exemptions and deductions. In my search I came upon the UN's form entitled "Request for 2014 income tax settlement and 2015 income tax advances" that is available for download as a Word doc, and in the declaration area that is immediately above the signature area that the staff member is swearing to, the form contains 14 numbered points including #10 that states this (bold is mine): 10. I certify that I have minimized my income tax for 2014 by utilizing all adjustments to income, deductions and exemptions to which I am entitled, including the itemizing of deductions if they exceed the standard deduction allowable. The form referenced above is F.65 and has a link to download from this page on the UN's tax FAQ page.

Why would you not treat the couple as you would any heterosexual couple on these points? Whatever your firm's policy is for documentation, that is what you should follow. If the couple says they are married, why wouldn't you accept that? Don't you accept their word from "straight" couples? The State of MD has recognized same sex marriages for the last 2 1/2 years, so I am assuming you haven't had any of these returns to prepare yet. The partners' change of names is a matter of choice, and in some states has been difficult for one or both to change names. It is a matter of state law at this point about the limitations on name changes. If the state allows, they may each retain their existing names just as some heterosexual couples do also, one may choose to take the name of his or her spouse, they may both decide to change names to a hyphenated version of both names, or they may decide on an entirely new name that establishes an identity of their family. Really, I'd just ask them like you would any other newly married couple if they've notified the SSA of any name change and if the SS cards you are presented accurately reflects their current names since being married. You might also consider asking if they have a preference about whose name appears as the primary name on the returns.

Could you provide a link to the discussion so that we could see it? It looks like you've posted over on the Drake forum also and have received some answers to what some others have had issues with. If you search that software subforum for "depreciation" you should get lots of hits with people asking questions. It seems that many of the posts are people asking about how to make specific entries or set up an asset properly, not that the program is flawed.

I haven't had any issues either, and I run another depreciation program for more detailed analysis of fixed assets for my business clients that require financial statements. The calculations have been accurate with both programs arriving at the same figures. One thing that Drake's depreciation does not do is that it doesn't automatically carry amounts to the Form 4684 for casualty and theft dispositions. I think it tries to put it on the 4797, so the user must make those entries manually on the 4684. I haven't had one of these to enter yet, so I'm not sure of how the entries would be made. One of my clients had damage and theft of copper wiring, etc from outside a/c units, but the entire replacement wasn't completed until 2015, so I attached the statement to defer that since the gain/loss wasn't determinable as of the filing date. I'll have to deal with that next tax season.

Ridiculously cute baby pygmy hippo takes his first swim:

Were any of the friends also hairdressers? That would lend more weight to their advice. /s

If this chair is one that costs a couple of hundred and looks like any other upright office or desk chair that has some small component that vibrates, then I'd probably deduct it if the taxpayer is using it at a desk or table that he uses for performing administrative functions of the business, whether or not he has a home office deduction, and its cost would probably fall in the de minimus range. Conversely, if this chair is one of those big cushy recliner types that cost thousands that doesn't at all lend itself to sitting at a desk or some other place where administrative functions of the business could be performed, then it is a personal expenditure. I'd have a problem in claiming that one of those cushy recliner-type massage chairs was in any way "ordinary" in the context of "ordinary and necessary" for a painting business. A good page on "ordinary and necessary".

I don't agree with this at all and think this is dangerous advice. The most widely accepted method of tick removal from the CDC and medical community says to not press on the tick's body and disturb the tick as little as possible when removing it so that it does not regurgitate it's stomach contents back into the person or pet it has attached to. In addition to that, this method may be just as likely to break off the mouthparts and leave those in the skin. While that may also happen when removing ticks with fine-tipped tweezers or tick removal tools, those methods are far less likely to cause the tick to spew tick-borne diseases back into its host. Any mouthparts that are left behind may cause anything from a little irritation to a small localized infection, but all the times I've had that happen, the body quickly isolated the bits left behind and they lifted off with a tiny scab of skin about a week later. I just had that exact thing last week when I used a tick removal tool inside one of my dog's ears, and I could feel something like a splinter left in the skin. It never got infected, never formed a scab, and never showed any irritation either. A small piece of dried skin flaked off a week later with the mouthpart embedded in it, and the skin underneath was perfect. The ticks are really bad this year here because of all the snow cover we had last winter. People think that the cold temperatures kill them but the snow actually acts like an insulator and the ticks actually survive better in cold temps if there is that snow cover like we had this past season.

​ I don't know why you think there should be a loss from the lottery tickets. When the lottery allows a retailer to sell tickets, the retailer is given the tickets to sell. The retailer sells the ticket and earns a commission for selling the ticket that would be income to him. The amount that the retailer owes to the lottery is not an expense, and it does not create a loss on the P&L in any way. The liability that is created is because the cash collected from the sales of the tickets does not belong to the retailer because he is acting in an agency capacity on behalf of the lottery.

It's close enough to me that I wish I'd known about it sooner. I'm not a member of NATP, so I didn't know about the expo being in Philly.

Article from Accounting Today , text is below. Check out the section under new initiatives, including the IRS reviewing the time it takes to complete a return. I hope the service isn't going to use those time estimates that are listed on the forms, and that IRS will somehow distinguish between self-prepared returns and those submitted by professionals. IRS Teams with Tax Prep Industry and States to Fight Identity Theft Tax Fraud By Michael Cohn The Internal Revenue Service met Thursday with tax preparation and software companies, payroll and tax financial product processors, and state tax administrators to announce a sweeping new collaborative effort to combat identity theft refund fraud and protect taxpayers. The agreement—reached after the project was originally announced March 19—includes identifying new steps to validate taxpayer and tax return information at the time of filing. The effort will increase information sharing between industry and governments. There will be standardized sharing of suspected identity fraud information and analytics from the tax industry to identify fraud schemes and locate indicators of fraud patterns. And there will be continued collaborative efforts going forward.“As recent events have underscored, the need to protect tax return information and our data systems has never been more important,” Koskinen said during a press conference Thursday. “Any organization in the public or private sectors with IT systems and sensitive data faces a battle that seems to grow every day. The nation's tax system is no different. That's why the work of the group gathered here today is so critical. The tax system faces an unprecedented challenge, but the tax industry, the states and the IRS have responded with a remarkable collaborative effort that holds short-term and long-term promise to improve the protection of the nation's taxpayers.” The IRS believes the agreement represents a new era of cooperation and collaboration among the IRS, states and the electronic tax industry that will help combat identity theft and protect taxpayers against tax refund fraud. "We've made tremendous progress, and we will continue these efforts," said Koskinen. "Taxpayers filing their tax returns next filing season should have a safer and more secure experience." He convened an earlier Security Summit on March 19 with the CEOs and leaders of private sector companies and federal and state tax administrators to discuss emerging threats on identity theft and expand existing collaborative efforts to stop fraud (see IRS Meets with Tax Community to Address Identity Theft). Three specialized working groups were established as part of the summit, with members from the IRS, states and industry co-chairing and serving on each team. During the past 12 weeks, the teams focused on developing ways to validate the authenticity of taxpayers and information included on tax return submissions, information sharing to improve detection and expand prevention of refund fraud, and threat assessment and strategy development to prevent risks and threats. New Initiatives The groups agreed to several important new initiatives in this unprecedented effort, including: * Taxpayer authentication: The industry and government groups identified numerous new data elements that can be shared at the time of filing to help authenticate a taxpayer and detect identity theft refund fraud. The data will be submitted to the IRS and states with the tax return transmission for the 2016 filing season. Some of these issues include, but are not limited to: • Reviewing the transmission of the tax return, including the improper and or repetitive use of Internet Protocol numbers, the Internet ‘address’ from which the return is originating. • Reviewing computer device identification data tied to the return’s origin. • Reviewing the time it takes to complete a tax return, so computer mechanized fraud can be detected. • Capturing metadata in the computer transaction that will allow review for identity theft related fraud. * Fraud identification: The groups agreed to expand sharing of fraud leads. For the first time, the entire tax industry and other parts of the tax industry will share aggregated analytical information about their filings with the IRS to help identify fraud. This post-return filing process has produced valuable fraud information because trends are easier to identify with aggregated data. Currently, the IRS obtains this analytical information from some groups. The expanded effort will ensure a level playing field so everyone approaches fraud from the same perspective, making it more difficult for the perpetration of fraud schemes. * Information assessment: In addition to continuing cooperative efforts, the groups will look at establishing a formalized Refund Fraud Information Sharing and Assessment Center (ISAC) to more aggressively and efficiently share information between the public and private sector to help stop the proliferation of fraud schemes and reduce the risk to taxpayers. This would help in many ways, including providing better data to law enforcement to improve the investigations and prosecution of identity thieves. * Cybersecurity framework: Participants with the tax industry agreed to align with the IRS and states under the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) cybersecurity framework to promote the protection of information technology infrastructure. The IRS and states currently operate under this standard, as do many in the tax industry. * Taxpayer awareness and communication: The IRS, industry and states agreed that more can be done to inform taxpayers and raise awareness about the protection of sensitive personal, tax and financial data to help prevent refund fraud and identity theft. These efforts have already started, and will increase through the year and expand in conjunction with the 2016 filing season. Working with Industry and States "Industry, states and the IRS all have a role to play in this effort," Koskinen said. "We share a common enemy in those stealing personal information and perpetrating refund fraud and we share a common goal of protecting taxpayers. We want to build these changes into the DNA of the entire tax system to make it safer.” Intuit CEO Brad Smith was one of the participants in the summit Thursday. “Today marks an important milestone in a multi-step journey for government and industry to work together to drive fraud out of the U.S. tax system,” Smith said in a statement. “We applaud this new set of security standards and data protocols that create a strong foundation for deepening the partnership between IRS, the states and industry. What makes this process so effective, and these outcomes so encouraging, is the collaboration and contribution from the entire tax ecosystem.” Smith, whose company needed to temporarily suspend tax filings earlier this season when state tax administrators detected a wave of suspicious filings coming from identity thieves, told reporters that the tax industry is working with the IRS to fight a common enemy. “We’re at the dawn of a new era of active collaboration between the IRS, the states, as well as the industry, and we are fighting together a common enemy, to stop this threat on the U.S. tax system, and the harm it causes to its victims, which are the U.S. taxpayers that we all serve,” said Smith. H&R Block CEO Bill Cobb also spoke to reporters and gave his kudos to the IRS and its team. “Sometimes the image isn’t always the best, but IRS has been fair, they’ve been relentless, they’ve been involved, and I know the commissioner himself has been directly involved with all the working groups, and that means a lot when the person at the top gets so involved, and it’s reflected in the work,” he said. “We want to instill confidence in taxpayers that this industry has moved to a level that is similar to online banking, that they’re going to be secure as they sign in as their account, and we’ll do everything we can to not allow fraudsters in there," said Cobb. "I would also add that what we’re asking Congress for is the ability to license tax preparers. Unscrupulous tax preparers are a problem in the industry. It is up to Congress to do the licensing. In this country, there are 50 states that license people who cut hair, but there are only four states that license people who prepare taxes, and that’s an outrage.” Many major system and process changes will be made this summer and fall by the participants in order to be ready for the 2016 filing season. The public-private partnership also will continue this cooperative, collaborative approach to address not just short-term issues but longer-term issues facing the tax community and taxpayers. The partnership parties recognize the need to continuously improve our tax system defenses for combating this threat to taxpayers and our tax system, Koskinen added. Those defenses include a continually improving multi-level identity proofing and authentication capability that anticipates and stops threats. "I applaud the industry and the states for stepping forward to take on this challenge and making the needed changes," Koskinen. "This is good for taxpayers, good for tax administrators and good for the tax community." Koskinen emphasized that a continuing theme throughout this effort focuses on protecting taxpayer information and privacy. “Working together we can achieve results that none of us, working alone, could accomplish,” he said. In addition to companies from the private sector, the summit team included several groups including the Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee, the Federation of Tax Administrators representing the states, the Council for Electronic Revenue Communication Advancement and the American Coalition for Taxpayer Rights. “Tax fraud is real, and we have seen the effects in states in the past few years,” said David Sullivan, president of the Federation of Tax Administrators and Tax Administrator of Rhode Island. “We stress at the FTA, in order to have a comprehensive plan, the states need to be involved every step of the way, and we have been.” Getting Ready for Next Tax Season “Everyone needs to understand that our collaborative efforts won’t end with the actions we’re taking to get ready for the upcoming filing season,” Koskinen pointed out. “The IRS and its partners will continue to work together to address longer-term issues facing the tax community and taxpayers in the efforts to combat stolen identity refund fraud. We want to ensure that we make lasting changes. These changes are being built into the DNA of the entire tax system.” Koskinen said the IRS is now dealing with a much more sophisticated enemy than in the past. “It’s clear that criminals have been able to gather increasing amounts of personal data as the result of ongoing data breaches at various sources outside the tax system,” he said. “That means protecting taxpayers is a bigger challenge than ever before. While we have stopped many individuals from participating in these crimes, we find that the type of criminal we are dealing with has changed. This problem has become something more than just random individuals stealing personal information, with each one filing a few dozen or maybe a few hundred false tax returns at a time. We are dealing more and more with organized crime syndicates here and around the world.” He pointed to the data breach that occurred in the IRS’s Get Transcript application. “Nothing illustrates this point better than the recent unauthorized attempts to access taxpayer information through our Get Transcript application, which we discovered last month,” he said. “There, the criminals had already accumulated significant, stolen information about taxpayers from other sources which allowed them, in some cases, to access previous individual tax return information.” Congress's Role Koskinen also asked Congress to provide more funding for the IRS, although House Republicans released a budget Wednesday that would once again cut the agency's budget. “In the battle against refund fraud, we observed another thing as the Security Summit groups worked,” said Koskinen. “This partnership can make immediate progress, but the IRS, the industry and the states cannot solve this problem alone. We need help. Congress has an important role to play. Adequate funding to the IRS is critical. But just as importantly, Congress can help in the fight against refund fraud and identity theft by passing several legislative proposals we’ve already made. One of the most important of these would accelerate the due dates of third-party information returns, such as W-2s. This would allow us to match these documents against income tax returns earlier in the tax filing process—and help us more quickly spot errors and potential fraud.” The leaders of the Senate’s main tax committee, Senate Finance Committee chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and ranking member Ron Wyden, D-Ore., welcomed the IRS announcement. “Over the past five years, we’ve seen a significant uptick in tax refund fraud. Fake returns have put victims’ identities at risk and every taxpayer suffers as their hard-earned dollars fall by the wayside and into the hands of fraudsters,” they said in a joint statement Thursday. “This must stop. The steps announced by the IRS today are a move in the right direction. However, the devil’s in the details, and we will be carefully monitoring how the new agreements are carried out to ensure taxpayers are being adequately protected and whether additional legislation is needed to protect taxpayers.”

http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/Business-Name-Change

Even if he ends up not being able to take the FTC, he can still use it as a deduction on Schedule A.

I'm willing to fix a nonfunctional link if it's beyond the time allowed for the OP to edit the post, and if I can figure out the actual place the link should go to, otherwise OP or someone would need to send us that info. With the links that might be malicious, obviously dealing with those expeditiously is more important than one that is nonfunctional. When someone sends a "report", the system makes a record of it and any comments sent, and allows any of us to read it, make comments and take actions. The difference with that and PMs is that the PM is seen by only its recipient, and then you'd be waiting for that exact person to respond the next time he or she visits this site. It really depends on how quickly you think something needs attention and action.

Instructions for form 8962 say that if over 400% of FPL, complete only column F for either line 11 or lines 12-23. Perhaps that is the problem.

Googling "real estate & promote fee" brought up these that might help you. Maybe you'll find other key words there as well. a 40-age pdf of basic concepts & issues of the real estate promote - http://www.pircher.com/media/publication/50_SACArticle.pdf https://www.realtymogul.com/blog/sponsor-promote-interests 152-page pdf with extensive calcs - http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/joseph.pagliari/files/other/FeeStructuresRE.pdf