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Bingo! This will be the issue. How many people are just going to treat this like the "free" money they got last year? Assume a client gets enhanced UI for 6 months, advanced CTC and works for 6 months. What are they going to say when you tell them they have no refund coming cause they got it during the year? This is going to be a bloody year for the chains (Block, Liberty, JH). They live off the quick turnaround, big refund checks and advancing loans off of the refunds. But then again, the President and Congress could decide that this is still unprecedented times and forgive the payback on the tax credits and allow UI to go untaxed for another year. We saw it before and we may see it again. Tom Modesto, CA

I could be wrong, but I seem to remember from an update course that unlike the stimulus payments, the advance child tax credit will have to be paid back if 2021 income is not what the IRS calculated the credit on. This year I had a few clients who could not come up with how much stimulus they got, but when I looked at their 2020 income and realized they were not going to get any more anyway, I just plugged in the standard amounts or entered zeros. (Say they really got $1k instead of $1200, but their 2020 income was too high to get anything, it made no difference what I put in there because they were definitely not going to get a recovery credit.) We won't be able to do that with the advance child tax credit in 2021 and will have many clients moaning when we present their tax bill. Right now we don't know enough about it to warn them. The IRS may do that, but how many people won't read it because they are thrilled by the thought of getting extra income?

But do you actually refuse to take new clients whohave been through a divorce and are sharing custody of their children? I understand not keeping both clients when they split up, and even not wanting to keep either of them for a few years. But this is a potential problem forever after for some people now.