Taxes!

he hates me because i'm english. i think he's irish italian.

there are many reasons why accountants dislike their clients ... I'm on a FB group where we discuss this.

ha! what are the common ones?

outside of the standard dislikeable traits of: not paying the bill, complaining about services being expensive, wanting things done at the last minute:

here are a few common complaints that accountants have about tax clients they dislike:

1. the client that thinks they know as much as the accountant about taxes but often doesn't know what they are talking about
2. the client that continually never has their shit together and always has to be reminded/informed of the same exact things every single year
3. the client that does the thing that the accountant tells them not to do and/or doesn't do the thing the accountant tells them to do (e.g. make estimated payments, pay salary out of an S-Corp) and then blames the accountant for the resulting problems
4. the client that needlessly over-complicates things (as in there is no financial advantage to having the complex business type or series of transactions)
4a. a variant of the needlessly over-complicator -- in the old days this was "the client with the unsorted box of receipts" -- now it's pdfs and folders of receipts for things they can't deduct or income that isn't taxable

oh and #5 -- the bad liar -- any licensed tax preparer has to follow certain ethical guidelines, it's a bit like lawyers (though lawyers have more professional protections) ...

in tax prep, the ethical dance re fraud generally is based on the legal premise that the preparer can take a client's word for things as long as they don't have reason to believe the client is full of shit. Skilled tax people (like lawyers) have ways of phrasing questions or requests for documentation to reduce the likelihood that a client will reveal that they are full of shit. The worst is the one who will volunteer they are full of shit and insist that the preparer go along with the fraud/cheating, sometimes not realizing that they are asking the preparer to do something that could lose them their license.

re: 2, i have my shit together, but i definitely asked the previous accountant the same questions every year. to be fair that was because i wasn't allowed to email them. all communication had to go through a stupid https portal thing and previous year's conversations were impossible to search.

i am becoming a landlord/class traitor this year so looking forward to doing lots of 4a.

all communication had to go through a stupid https portal thing and previous year's conversations were impossible to search.

i hate those things -- a lot of accountants use them now. I am sure a lot of it is because they don't want to deal with coming up with their own computer systems because there was such a standardized way of how things were done in the paper + in-person appointments era ... also most accountants are kinda lazy tbh

So now the Feds are extending deadlines for some storm-ravaged states - what I can't tell is if it's only for people who live in the named counties, or if the new deadline is statewide?

https://www.ktvu.com/news/irs-extends-tax-deadlines-storm-victims-7-states-2023

My tax accountant uses a portal too, I uploaded a lot of stuff but insisted on meeting him personally. I consolidated accounts from three different firms into one this year, it was not all that much money in the long run but I was sweeping over funds including proprietary holdings that had to be liquidated and sold before transfer and including a donor-advised charity fund. I also contributed for the first time to a Roth IRA using the non-taxable portion of my 401k and transferring some taxable money from my IRA.

There were a lot of documents to upload and finances and financial strategy to think about, and I'm grateful that someone else was strategizing about it and explaining it to me

I'm going to do another Roth conversion this year but don't expect my taxes will be very complicated

xp - that deadline was extended back in January (to May) and then extended until October back in early March -- for California, it's almost statewide in that only a few counties are excluded, but the most populous ones are all extended

thanks sarahell - that KTVU article didn't include Alameda (their home base!) and I freaked for a minute but it seems that Alameda IS included

Salute to anyone getting it in under the wire, wherever you are.

on my way to the midnight post office

Direct File is a new tax tool to file your federal taxes directly with the IRS.

currently available in 12 states

https://directfile.irs.gov

I was just collecting and organizing all the information we'll need to do our taxes. It's all ready to go (!) except one or two forms that haven't arrived yet in the mail.

Literally in the same boat here -- one 1099 and the health insurance form. Otherwise just dying to send this all off and be done with it.

Actually correct that, the health form just landed per a check just now. So basically a remaining 1099 theoretically although I'm slightly suspicious about it showing up by tomorrow. (I have the total separately -- not a large amount -- and will roll it in as needed.)

Roffle. And said 1099 JUST landed in my inbox. Timing!

And how are we all doing. (About to send my final paperwork/payment off to my accountants tomorrow and then I just wait...)

Done & filed. State tax refund showed up hours ago. Federal refund due.

Uuuuggghhhhh

Time change, smoke detector battery checks, and tax time

Saw my state and federal refunds pending in my account yesterday.

I always have to pay more, so I procrastinate.

i’m lucky to be able to afford someone to do this for me, as every year i get about $3k back. if it was me doing it i’d either 1) not do it 2) mess it up or 3) spend so long on it that i may as well have paid someone to do it in the first place

133 pages this year. Great system.

Filed in mid-February, got my NJ refund yesterday, which is me cutting my last tie to that state. I are an Montanan now.

Been in the US since last spring, went to see a tax advisor yesterday as we have a slightly confusing set-up with one partner working full-time and income also coming in from a couple of different UK sources. Left the meeting vastly more confused than when I went in, which seems par for the course with accountants going by past experience. Bloody hell I thought dealing with the Inland Revenue was bad!

compared to the inland revenue it is ... unbelievably bad.

Oh jeez Matt#2. This is your first go around then? It is profoundly unpleasant (and expensive).

Been in the US since last spring, went to see a tax advisor yesterday as we have a slightly confusing set-up with one partner working full-time and income also coming in from a couple of different UK sources. Left the meeting vastly more confused than when I went in, which seems par for the course with accountants going by past experience. Bloody hell I thought dealing with the Inland Revenue was bad!

Oh jeez Matt#2. This is your first go around then? It is profoundly unpleasant (and expensive).

American taxes are so dumb. Last year I made a mental error and ended up owing a couple thousand, so I predictably overcorrected for that this year PLUS I didn't account for a couple of changes in our favor — standard deduction went up, IRA contribution limits went up, plus most significantly also our health insurance went from us paying for it ourselves through the marketplace to my wife getting it through work, which means it now comes out pre-tax.

All of which means that even though we on paper made more money this year than last year, our taxable income went down while I boosted my estimated tax payments — so now after owing money last year it looks like we're going to get the biggest refund of our lives this year. Which MAYBE I could've anticipated if I spent more time thinking about all of this or thought about it more than once a year, but anyway it's a dumb system.

And now I'm afraid the big jump in refund will somehow get us audited, but whatever, I think I could survive that.

Every single state and national politician in the USA loves to tinker with the tax code. The result is a mind-boggling complexity that never repeats itself from year to year. The forms keep shape-shifting, the instructions are baroque, credits come and go with bewildering rapidity.

I've kept our financial life as boring and vanilla as it possibly could be and I keep comprehensive records. But I finally gave up doing our taxes because I never knew for sure that the some new wrinkle had been inserted deep into the instructions, so I had to relearn the procedures every year. The tax software helps, but now I just hand it over to a preparer and wash my hands of the whole mess.

I plugged along on my own for some years but I remember Elvis Telecom telling me in the start of the 2000s I should really go for a tax guy. After I realized a couple of long-standing errors in approach that I'd been doing for some time a few years later, I took said advice and frankly I'm all the better for it. My situation is certainly less complex than some but it's not easy plug and play either, and frankly I'll always be reassured knowing someone else's name is on the return as well as mine.

For awhile there weren’t very many changes tbh (between 2000 and 2016) … the last 7 years have been chaotic in comparison. The “evil software companies” love to advertise how many changes there are and how it is just so much that you really need to pay for their software…. the reality is that the vast majority of the changes to the tax code don’t affect the average person’s tax return. Also, as a professional tax person, I have now come around to the concept of the free file, pre-filled click and submit thing for people whose taxes are simple. Like if everything you are taxed on and can deduct is reported to the IRS already, and there isn’t anything else… you shouldn’t have to pay for help or software or spend much time dealing with it.

I can nerd out about it but … yeah, it is dumb

The stupid Trump Cock Jizz Act of 2017 was the biggest set of changes since 1986 … and it has a lot of really stupid provisions that need to go away ASAP

I do my own and it’s medium complex (a bunch of 1099s, plus Burning Ambulance is an LLC) but nothing I can’t handle. People act like taxes are like slide-ruling a mission to Mars but they’re really not IME.

stockholm syndrome

they really did become much more complicated a few years ago for me, but luckily i only have one 1099 this year, so absent some colossal fuckup on our healthcare advocate’s end, we won’t owe money this year— last spring, we got a new coat put on the roof and also owed the IRS $1300 because we made more money than we had predicted on our healthcare forms. doesn’t sound like much but it basically ruined the next four months of our lives.

gonna have to do the installment plan this year :(

It's not impossible to figure out what needs to be done to fill out one's taxes, just detailed, time-consuming and very tiresome. For example, Oregon's lawmakers keep adding credits, then removing them, or changing the qualifications. A few years ago the OR Dept. of Revenue revised their basic tax form from 2 pages to 4 pages. When the big federal tax changes were passed at the tail end of December 2017 it caused states to make cascading revisions to counteract the many punitive features the Republicans inserted just to pwn the libs in the NE and west coast. So, have fun!

People act like taxes are like slide-ruling a mission to Mars but they’re really not IME.

Very much depends on circumstances I think. Mine are more complicated since becoming self-employed, though still not excessively so. We do standard deduction, but if you're in an itemizing-deductions situation, that gets more complicated too. For all the years my wife and were just getting employer W-2s and a little bit of freelance income, yeah, that was easy-peasy.

I have the extra simplicity of living in a state with no income tax. Big change from my NYC years where there was federal, state AND local.

Oregon is a challenge as far as states go, you are otm Aimless. And then there is the Multnomah County form on top of that…

made it

Uhm, for the first time in a long time, we haven't received the refund we are supposedly owed, despite it being more than three weeks (or 21 days) from being submitted. Truly afraid they're gonna audit us, even tho we have little to no money and have been struggling for the past year and a half.

Have you checked the status of the return on the IRS/state website? That will tell you if the refund is processing.

It has been received and is processing.

It was "accepted" by both state and federal the day after I filed, which was a Sunday.

It’s more common to get a correction letter than be audited… like way way more common. Lmk if anyone is interested in hearing more about this… I seriously don’t want to take up space with this stuff if no one gaf

You're in the right thread, have at it