Catherine

the trick: define "non-essential" using words of less than three syllables.

I no longer use ATX, so I can't help with input screens. However - only US employers get put in as W2 wages. There should be a foreign employer section as part of the 2555. Either way, you then exclude that income later in the 2555. Hope this helps.

He sells stuff to fund his site; it's at the beginning because at the end people skip it. Can't fault him for that, even if I generally don't like anything he tries to sell. His reporting, however, is excellent.

My deepest sympathies on your losses. My husband came home, a few years back, from one of a LONG series of trips to New Mexico, took one look around our house, and said, "We can't do this to the girls; we have GOT to get rid of stuff here." He spent a week and a half to two weeks, every month, for nine months, cleaning out his mother's house after she passed away. His folks had built the house when he was 4 or 5. Somewhere in the attic he found his TinkerToy set, put there when he was 12 - he had no idea why it was still there. We've been slowly jettisoning, consolidating, and making sure paperwork was in place, ever since. It's still a work in progress. Not made easier by all the crap the girls left behind when they moved out, or moved from one place to another and needed to "leave this with you for a little while, till I can come pick it up." Although, frankly, those particular items I have no trouble leaving for them to deal with, as it only seems fair. Good luck to you in your endeavors, and enjoy your camping trip away.

Not really intentional, unless you want to include that one of the agencies decimated by a prior administration (and still run by that admin's appointed leader) that shall remain nameless was the CDC; they were not prepared to get the tests or testing protocols out there. The first test sets sent out had an 80% false-positive rate. THAT is totally useless, and they had to pull those tests and get better tests and testing protocols out. Can't be done overnight - unless you are ready for and expecting a fast epidemic of that particular type of virus. Keep in mind nation SIZE as well; many European nations (and South Korea) are significantly smaller than some of out STATES. Far easier to monitor a place the size and population of Virginia. Not really. The current rate of doubling (2nd derivative - rate of change of change - crucial in physics as well as epidemiology) is already slowing. Please also note that there is a lag in reporting that second derivative, because of delays for testing results. Also because of the expansion of testing is *showing* more cases - but those cases were already extant; they are not new, just newly reported. Bill Still (on yourtub; Still Report) has been doing a good job tracking and reporting on this.

Interest and dividends in excess of $7,500 only. NH doesn't recognize S-corp election, and has special rules for p'ships. Your client is clear.

My contribution to the pool: March 27th, 4:30pm.

You mean, like half of our tax clients?

I agree and I disagree. There is a HUGE push towards panic by the media looking for clickbait. So the panic is most decidedly being pushed. Cui bono? Who benefits? What important issues are no longer in the public eye? Distraction works, no doubt. However, there is a long time between exposure and symptoms, but not between exposure and sharing the wealth (as it were), which means that for every case known, there are up to hundreds that are not yet known. The emergency measures are a good idea, but not because it's "so dangerous" rather it's logistics. Most people who get this will have mild cases; the younger the milder - so with kids it's almost un-noticeable. Serious cases tend to be those compromised (by age, by pre-existing condition, by smoking, by local pollution levels, by general sanitation, and more). That's a big factor in the seriousness they had in China; older population living crowded with bad sanitation, some of the world's worst pollution levels, and adult male smoking rates near 50%. If you get a boatload of serious cases needing ICU support *at once* you overwhelm the system. Then death rates skyrocket, because people who could recover with care can't get the care because the necessary equipment is in use for someone else. Plus anyone who has another health issue (bad accident, heart attack, who knows - acute scrofula, fer gosh sake) also cannot get care. Health workers are exhausted; they get sick. Or make sloppy, exhausted-people errors. When you slow down transmission, that overwhelmed system does NOT happen. The serious cases can all get attention, because there is space within the system to provide it. Death rates plummet. They found in the Spanish Flu in 1918 that cities like St Louis, that instituted school shut-downs etc earlier (before there were any cases in the city) had incidence rates and death rates far lower than cities like Denver, that didn't shut down until after cases cropped up. (Side note: as it turns out, a lot of the young, healthy people who died in the 1918 incident died from massive *aspirin* overdose - Bayer had a new drug, and was recommending dosage levels that turned out to be lethal. That got covered up for them, but the symptoms presented of hemorrhage etc in the younger victims were not signs of flu, but rather of aspirin overdose.) Transmission rates are high, yes - but transmission rates are far higher for measles or chicken pox. I remember being sent to the neighbor's house when the three boys had measles, so my brother and I would catch it and get it over with. We shared lollipops with them. Neither my brother nor I got measles. I'm sure most of us here are old enough that we remember similar events. Death rates will go DOWN as more cases are identified. There are so many mild cases simply not being reported currently that death rates are over-stated since those diagnosed are largely the more-seriously ill cases. If you are under 70 or so and healthy (and don't smoke or vape), there is a very low chance of having a serious case. Those who do get a serious case need substantial care for a longer than normal (for a flu or pneumonia) time. So slowing the rate of incidence of all cases will keep us better able to treat anyone who needs more help than a box of tissues, motrin, and chicken soup.

At the office, we are using bleach wipes on all knobs, the light switches, and keyboards a couple of times a day - more often if there are a lot of people in and out. We scan all client docs, so if I'm using docs on a screen, and my keyboard etc has been wiped, while I'm still trying (and failing, mostly) to keep hands away from face (hard, with glasses and allergies), I'm not too concerned. More hand-washing. There is a bottle of sanitizer; that is getting more use, too. The huge box of pens we bought a year or so ago is getting more use; I'm putting out new pens for each client and urging them to take 'em away with them. We're finding more people want to drop off docs without talking (fine with me!) and more are using our portal (even better). More people want returns mailed back rather than coming to pick up, so we are getting signature forms later. LOTS of questions about what is going to happen about deadlines; my standard answer is that we'll know when there is an official announcement.

You are spot-on, @Medlin Software. When I was training our current assistant as well as my prior assistant, I told each of them that they need to be able to look at the papers that came in for the client, and *know* what the final return should look like from those. Because the software can't do the thinking for them, and the software can come up with incorrect results.

@Pacun you may well be right in your guess at what the airline is thinking. That doesn't mean their "thinking" is right! If the trip was personal, the expense was personal, and the refund is personal. End of story. And it's not even like they *decided* not to go - travel was shut down; not possible. Get the cash, it's not taxable, the airline giving tax advice/scares is as meaningless as me giving advice to a trained pilot on how to fly.

"A grim old accountant lay dying, his briefcase supporting his head. His pinstripes were all of a tatter, as he rose on his elbow and said, "Wrap me up with me brolly and briefcase, and bury me deep down below, with me files on the floor of the file room, in a place where the tax men don't go." First verse of "The Dying Accountant" sung to the tune of "Tarpaulin Jacket" and performed by the Inland Navigators Bush Band of Sydney Australia. At one point he puts a brick through his video screen. Great song.

where's the fun in that?

Hear, hear! I agree that QuickBooks is a ROYAL pain in the patootie. However, if you ever work with the online version, you will KISS your computer when you go back to the desktop version. I loathe, detest, and abhor the online version. We refuse any new clients using QBO, and are working to get our remaining online clients onto a desktop version. Even the Apple version of QB is better than QBO!

Me, too! (Especially the little girl who complains about "the xml we've given them like SEVEN times already!")

Report the income on the estate income return, yes. But then ALSO add in "repayment of over-paid pension" as a correction. The estate should not be paying tax on income that was repaid. I could tell you where to enter that in Drake, but someone else will have to provide that detail for ATX. If it comes out a wash ($0 total) then lower the repayment by $1 ($1 more income). In general, as long as there is taxable income generated, the detail information does transmit. It's when the total comes out to zero that the details get left behind.

We find these sometimes more complex than C-corp returns, because of basis tracking and multiple shareholders plus their health insurance (frequently done wrong). For a new client, $1200 minimum. We will discount from there if need be - sometimes very heavily - but always show the full price on the bill, then the discount. If we are doing the personal returns we discount (package pricing). If their accounting is ready to go (reports ready to use as-is, maybe tease out shareholder health insurance from employee, and of course add in depreciation) that also gets people an excellent discount. If we get a train-wreck, then they pay bookkeeping fees for QB repair on top of that return fee.

Right about now, we could all use 2 1/2 minutes of remembering how much fun we are having.

Because it takes a minute to fill out the reporting form, and far longer to answer the CP2000 letter a year and a half from now.

THANK YOU, @Medlin Software for that shortcut! @TaxmannEA the spurious character might be a SPACE. Impossible to see. If you can find the right screen, start with the first entry field and highlight it, hit "Delete" tab to next, rinse and repeat for all fields on that screen. Faster to do than to explain - but it should work, once you're on the right screen.

I'm so tired tonight that when I first read this I read "E I E I O" and was going to make a joke about Old MacDonald. You might be missing something. About ten or a dozen years ago they changed the foreign exclusion so that income above the exclusion would be taxed at the rate applicable without the exclusion (hit one of my clients, living in the Philppines, hard that first year post-change). If your client's income was at $420K, they will get taxed at the highest bracket. The $57K excluded will be 22% marginal bracket income, and the tax on that amount (assuming what you have given is the TAXABLE income, after deductions) is about $8,400. So a number closer to $8,400 should be the amount of tax less than otherwise. Does that make sense, or am I too tired to explain it correctly? Maybe I should just go back to reciting "Old MacDonald had a farm" instead.

The idea was thunked up by both of them, but one was the primary person active and the other was consulting. So yes, both were involved. One will claim the whole operation as her Sch C, and the other will claim her portion of the income on her own Sch C as a consultant to the first one. Eventually (assuming it all works out the way they'd like) they will form a corporation and go on payroll. At that time, they'll need a new EIN anyhow, along with payroll processing and state reporting and all the rest. This is really for a couple of years until they decide it will make them enough money to be worth the effort to incorporate and apply for 501c3 status (you can't go from partnership to corporate 501c3 without a new EIN, so either way they're stuck with that).

Sent using the entity's EIN - but there was NO tax structure chosen at the time the EIN was assigned. So it was like a Sch C sending out 1099s. And yes, I got a retainer and did nothing until the check cleared. Although these are good clients I generally would not worry about. They got really bad advice from people who *claimed* to be specialists in non-profit law *and* taxation.

The original partnership fiscal-year return was NOT all zeros; it had fiscal-year figures. I propose to amend that return TO all zeros and calendar year (as the IRS demanded of them) and mark it both initial and final. Plus the explanatory letter - copies of the IRS letters telling them this wasn't allowed and to fix it should help. Then amend 2018 personal to include Sch C. The "consultant" is cuz instead of doing K-1s to partners they skipped that and sent 1099-MISCs to both individuals. The Sch C "partner" 1099-MISC does a circle: out as expense and back in as income; no net change. The other "partner" gets her 1099-MISC and reports on her own return. Amended 1040 also gets explanatory letters. 2019 we do it all right, from the start. Oh good; I was hoping this sounded reasonable to more than just me and my business partner.