Leaderboard

Pacun, thanks for the recommend. I *liked* your post above, and the part below gave me a good chuckle. Yes, I know that is not what you really meant to say, it struck me funny though.

I think we need it now to have post quesstions and solutions. I am ready to put some questions now and I know some people have the answers. I like to give credit to whomever deserves credit. If you want to get your CPE credits without learning a lot, go to www.apluscpe.com and the credits are not expensive BUT there is one course called "Affordable Care Act in the Real World" which is EXCELLENT and you should buy it. This course is a video course and it is for Tax Preparers. They have about 3 other courses regarding ACA but this one is the best and I recommend it.

Sara, your post pretty much covers it and I gave you a "like". What I didn't like was the suggestion to trust the software to "do the rest". I firmly believe that is something we should never do with any situation. It is all well and good if that is true, however we need to know WHY and where the software is going with those numbers. Otherwise, we are not professional tax preparers. I have attended two ACA seminars and I WANT to understand it; but have to admit that I don't totally. Am waiting and hoping for the pieces to fall into place when we reach the "hands on" phase. One of the hardest things we may have to face this year would be all of the false, misleading, totally untrue and partially untrue stories that are going around out there. Some of the things my clients try to tell me make me doubt myself. We have to learn this law. My greatest fear is that we may spend hours agonizing over and studying a subject that might someday go away or at least change to a great degree. For that reason, I am keeping a low profile for now.

Medicare definitely counts as qualified coverage. Large-company provided insurance should too. With smaller companies, who knows? My hunch is their insurance providers wrote them new plans if the old ones weren't qualified. It won't matter for filing season 2015 (tax year 2014) because the employers and insurance companies were given an extension to report these things until 2015, and the IRS has no way of checking (their admission) if 2014 plans were qualified. People who got insurance through the exchanges or don't have insurance will be the complex ones. The exchanges will provide a form showing how much advance premium credit they got, it any. I went to a seminar this week and everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief when the speaker said all you need to know is household size, household income, and the numbers on the exchange form. The software does it all! (He uses Ultratax, not sure about ATX.) Household income can be tricky though. For example, nontaxable Social Security income counts for all household members, including kids who might be getting SS from a deceased parent's account. Hopefully this was all included in the exchange enrollment questions, so there should be no surprises. For those with no insurance, the software will do it all. Unless of course the taxpayer qualified for an exception. Best to read up on those. That said, we still have to be able to explain it to the client, and that will take education. (Kind of like explaining why part of a client's SS is taxed--you can't unless you understand the math.) And there will be kinks galore. I just researched what happens if someone who gets an advance credit gets married. One would think income for the unmarried months would be used to calculate the credit. Nope. Total household income on the joint return is divided in half, as if each spouse earned half the income during the year. The credit is calculated on that amount. So if a guy who earned $25k and got a premium credit marries in December to someone who earned $75k, he would be treated as if he had earned $50k and have to pay the whole advance back. These unusual situations should be rare, but if we typically help our clients with tax planning we really need to get educated.