Lee B

Information mailed in December with receipt acknowledged by IRS on December 22, 20021, still not processed. Just received a CP22A asking for Balance Due Payment by June 6th 2022. Called Phone Number on the letter and asked for an up to date transcript. Couldn't get thru to a live person or get into an on hold queue?

I have never priced by form since tax preparation isn't my main source of revenue, monthly writeup/payroll provides most of my revenue. I price based on my perception of value delivered to my client. A few examples of none writeup related tax returns. The least expensive Form 1040 that I did was $375 - Retired Single client with Schedule B and state Schedule A plus QCDs. i did a MFJ - 1 W2 plus Home Daycare Schedule C plus CTC for $450 ( Probably underpriced this one). My minimum fee for a simple Form 1065 is $500. All of the rest of my 1120 and 1120S returns are writeup related clients.

IMHO, it's much better to consistently raise your fees a small amount every year. For example a $200 return increased just $ 5 a year is a $250 return after 10 years. When you do that your clients expect their bill to be a bit more and most won't complain. When you don't increase your fees, you have trained your clients to expect their fees to remain the same.

Some practitioners suggest using the Spanish line since they speak English on those lines also.

I used it for many years including 2 years after I switched to Drake for tax returns. However they kept increasing the price. In addition they didn't keep up with the changes to my state payroll taxes. At that point, it made no sense.

"Cyberattack knocks Ruby Receptionists offline, disrupting service for thousands." "Ruby said the cyberattack hit its service provider, Opus Interactive, Sunday evening. Because Opus did not provide a timetable for restoring its services, Ruby said Wednesday it has rebuilt its systems on Amazon Web Services’ network."

Follow the money, this way anyone who wants to efile a 94x has to pay a third party. I remember filing 941s on my touch tone phone, took about 3 1/2 to 4 minutes.

Copied from Accounting Today: "The Internal Revenue Service plans to migrate its set of online services for tax professionals to the third-party provider ID.me this summer despite objections being raised in Congress to the authentication company. The IRS said in an email Wednesday to tax professionals that the following products and applications will be impacted: • Affordable Care Act (ACA) for Transmitter Control Code (TCC); • Application Program Interface (API) Client ID Application; • e-File Application; • Information Returns (IR) for TCC; • Income Verification Express Service (IVES) Application; • State Applications (State EFIN and TDS State); • TIN Matching, including Bulk and Interactive TIN Matching; • Transcript Delivery System (TDS); • Secure Object Repository (SOR); • Modernized e-File (MeF); and • ACA Information Returns (AIR). The IRS noted that while the e-Services applications won’t use ID.me until this summer, tax professionals can get ready for the migration and set up an ID.me account now using Tax Pro Account." Once again the IRS is getting a lot of push back from Congress.

Current Drake user, long time ATX user. Based on what you're looking for, you should be looking at Lacerte, Pro System or Ultra Tax, not ATX, Drake or Tax Wise.

My understanding is that these were mostly 1098 & 1099s plus some 1095s.

According to TIGTA, the IRS has over 2 Million unprocessed Amended Tax Returns

Judy, Join the crowd, you are in extremely good company

Judy, I apologize, my post was about what I tend to do not about what you did.

On the other hand, I do understand Judy's response. In the past I probably have posted too many times about topics that weren't really in my area of expertise. So I have been really trying to limit my posts to stuff I actually know something about.

https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/news/2022/may/staffing-shortages-backlog-hampered-irs-2022-filing-season-tigta-says.html Excerpts: "TIGTA's findings suggested that gains the IRS made in expanding its workforce as planned came too little or too late to significantly affect filing season operations. For example, as of March 15, 2022, the IRS had added 521 new employees to its Submission Processing unit, which was only 9.5% of its hiring goal of 5,473, TIGTA reported. Hiring was more successful in its Accounts Management function, meeting 76.5% of its goal of 5,000 more staff members." "The number of assistor toll-free incoming calls answered during 2022 (as of March 4) was far fewer in 2022, falling to 2,688,000 from 4,444,000 in 2021 (as of March 5), with the level of service, or percentage answered, falling to 19.5% in 2022 from 27.3% in 2021. And the average speed of answering those calls increased, to 24 minutes in 2022 from 18 minutes in 2021." "Taxpayer correspondence remained an Achilles' heel, as well. As of March 19, 2022, Accounts Management's inventory included 7.6 million cases — a relatively minor net difference from the 8 million cases the function held at the end of 2021. Overaged cases within that inventory has remained an ongoing challenge, TIGTA reported. The IRS "has not taken any significant actions to address the continued lack of quality customer service it offers taxpayers corresponding with the IRS," despite TIGTA's earlier recommendations that it said could improve account service." "Paper-filed and amended returns also contribute to the problem, both only slightly smaller components of unprocessed returns on the week ending March 12, 2022, compared with the week ending Dec. 31, 2021. Original returns on paper fell slightly, to nearly 4.5 million, from the 4.7 million returns at the end of 2021, while amended returns awaiting work were down to 2.24 million from 2.38 million. One potential reason is both categories of unprocessed returns at the end of 2021 were higher than at the end of 2020 and an order of magnitude greater than at the end of 2019. By comparison, original paper returns awaiting processing at the end of 2019 numbered only 183,000, and amended returns 110,443."

All I am trying to say is that they have the option, if they want, to continue their Family Coverage HDHP combined with the HSA, as long as they don't sign up for Medicare. I am not ignoring your fact pattern.

In addition to the form, a letter from the employer confirming the coverage and the date the coverage ended is required. I have these letters in my files for both myself and my spouse.

"Do I need to sign up for Medicare when I turn 65? It depends on how you get your health insurance now and the number of employees that are in the company where you (or your spouse) work. Generally, if you have job-based health insurance through your (or your spouse’s) current job, you don’t have to sign up for Medicare while you (or your spouse) are still working. You can wait to sign up until you (or your spouse) stop working or you lose your health insurance (whichever comes first)" He can hold off signing up for Medicare until his spouses coverage ends.

They have been out there for a number of years. I don't know anyone who has ever used them. I read a post on another site where a user said they paid $991 for Drake last year thru this reseller. Going thru a reseller may mean you have to rely on them for support, not the software provider.

I just received a phone call. My Caller ID said "State of Oregon" so I answered the phone. The person calling said they were from the Century Link, a regional phone company. So I asked her why does my Caller ID say, "State Of Oregon" when you say you're from Century Link? She abruptly hung up, scammers are getting more creative!

I have signed up for most of the various IRS email notifications. I received the following this morning: "The IRS wants to make it easier for taxpayers to use IRS.gov by improving how the website is organized. Certain taxpayers may sign up to attend study sessions and tell the IRS how they want to find the information they need. Participant eligibility requirements include: Must be 18 or older Must be an employer, small business owner or retirement plan administrator, or work for a tax-exempt organization May not be a current, or past, employee of the IRS or U.S. Department of the Treasury Eligible taxpayers can sign up for one of the following 1-hour web conferencing sessions based on the category they fall into: Businesses Retirement plan administrators Tax-exempt entities, including charities and non-profits Selected participants will receive an email from the IRS research team with details of how to attend." I thought OK, I have a few useful ideas that I could contribute, so I tried to sign up. Amazingly, there are no sessions available. Why do they even bother? Another superficial Public Relations gimmick

I would certainly hope so.

I did find another article that said last year Intuit dropped all support for 2018 and earlier versions of QBD.

I just use an answering machine, especially since the majority of the calls I receive are either robocalls or scams. Most of my clients are used to my preference of using email. Of course at my age I am not trying to grow my practice.

Everyone loves a good juicy rumor, what are the specifics so I can tell someone else?