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We are all shooting in the dark here. Most people are not conversant in legal terminology and often get it wrong. What did the client mean that the government closed its case? If it refers to the case linked below, which could be the case referred to, they probably meant that the government closed its argument and the case went to jury. The jury handed down its verdict and then the defendants filed an appeal. When a defendant loses, there is almost always an appeal. It is a CYA move for the attorneys. A federal appeal moves fairly quickly, but could take from 6 months to a year. There are elements of a Ponzi scheme here as individual account statements were issued showing falsified earnings. https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/pr/chicago-investment-manager-convicted-federal-fraud-charges-swindling-10-million-clients

Try your phone number. Sometime in the past I recall having a similar issue and called the help line and was told that the 10-digit was the phone number I provided when the account was originally set up.

A first and a second (in more than 3 decades). 1. Tips incorrectly handled for 2019 Q1 (at least from what the customer shared). Deducted from net pay (tipped out each shift), but not added to income. Employees did not catch this (and they likely would not, since the error results in more net pay since not enough taxes were withheld). CPA (my customer) noticed on the Q1 941. While annoying, and will cost the CPA some effort to fix, no real out of pocket cash loss for the employer or CPA. 2. A customer, who prepares payroll for others, handled tips properly for 2018, but made a setup change BEFORE printing W2 forms, which caused the reported/declared tips to be "regular" other income. W2s were given out with no reported tips. Looks like a wash for tax liability, but still a bad deal as the employer is likely changing payroll providers (and dealing with and explaining to unhappy employees). For this arena, I post this as something else to add to your check lists, to watch for cases where your client is a tipped employee, but their W2 has no SS tips shown. (I have asked, but have not yet heard how the issue for number 2 was found. I think it was likely an employee's preparer.) For payroll preparers, a modest check list reviewed for every payroll run would have never let this error slip past. I will be adding another warning routine to warn if deducted tips are more than declared tips, proving again more than half of my programming is adding warnings.

That's one more reason to use the "duplicate return" choice from the "file" pull down menu. By doing that, you leave the original filing intact. This is what you can do if having two returns causes you confusion: 1. Open the original return which is name John Smith. 2. Pull down the file menu and select amend return. This will create Copy 1 John Smith 3. close both returns and rename John Smith to "John Smith Original" and the other you can rename it "John Smith Amended" 4. Open the "John Smith Amended" return and make your changes. 5. Next Year roll John Smith Amended. Once you have in ATX2019, rename it to John Smith to avoid future confusion. I do rename after the roll over because I don't want to think that we have amended in future years. I know that some of you create a PDF of the original return, which is a good idea but I don't do that. The above instructions always work for me.