Lee B

Yes, it's not free, you have to give them a debit or credit card and you have to go all three services. You can do a 90 day fraud alert for free.

Surprise, Surprise, I have just been notified that September is my Official ATX Anniversary Month ! Therefore, I can still renew before October 1st and receive my May Renewal Discount. Woah, who knew that ATX had Official Anniversary Months.

It's a race to the bottom with Equifax. At this rate they will pass Comcast on the way down. I must say that after 20 years with ATX, I have finally decided to throw in the towel and switch to Drake.

After also doing a google search, almost all of the information out there is from the websites of firms promoting and selling these trusts. These promoters also charge an annual fee as a % of the trust assets. They seem to heavily marketed to attorneys and financial advisers.

A local financial adviser has been actively promoting "Deferred Sales Trusts" as a way to minimize taxes from the sale of capital assets. Since I have never heard of these trusts, are they legitimate or ?

This is a copy of the official IRS news release explaining the change dated February 8, 2017: "A new revision of the Instructions for Form 7004, updated in the last few days and available at IRS.gov/LatestForms, correctly reflects that calendar year C corporations are eligible for an automatic 6-month extension. Although Internal Revenue Code section 6081(b) provides a 5-month automatic extension period for calendar year C Corporations, the IRS is granting a 6-month automatic extension under section 6081(a) instead. This change is reflected in the new revision of the Instructions for Form 7004. We have posted this article because the IRS wants to reassure the tax professional community that the information is correct in the Form 7004 instructions regarding the automatic 6-month extension and explain that the reason it's correct is section 6081(a). Information regarding Form 7004 and its instructions is always available at IRS.gov/form7004."

According to the Equifax website, neither my wife or I had our information exposed. Yea ! On the other hand, I just downloaded my free credit report from Trans Union and I noticed that in the last eight months at least 8 different financial institutions that I have never heard of have requested credit information about me. So now I get it, if you are a supposedly legitimate financial institution, you can just buy someone's personal credit info from one of the big 3 credit reporting services who are more than happy to sell it to them, since they are very profitable businesses. This is the dark side of free enterprise. Everything is for sale ! #*#*#*

This is a copy of a AICPA chart footnote: "Law provided for a Sept. 15 due date. But, according to the new Form 7004 instructions and IRS website, the IRS has used its authority to permit an automatic six-month extension to Oct. 15." Yeah, this is confusing, supposedly the IRS announced this change in February. I was planning based on an OSCPA Tax Update Class that I took in January, so I now have an extra 30 days to finish my one C Corporation return that is still on extension.

ATLANTA (AP) -- Credit monitoring company Equifax says a breach exposed social security numbers and other data from about 143 million Americans. The Atlanta-based company said Thursday that "criminals" exploited a U.S. website application to access files between mid-May and July of this year. It said consumers' names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some cases, driver's license numbers were exposed. Credit card numbers for about 209,000 U.S. consumers were also accessed. The company said hackers also accessed some "limited personal information" from British and Canadian residents. Wow, if Equifax can get hacked, no one's information is safe ! Maybe I should go offgrid and deal in cash only !

ATX programs have always been a major resource hog. When the ATX program is installed, it sets up 4 different database servers on both standalone and networked systems. IMHO the program starts and tries to access the servers before the servers have spun up which generates the error messages, which is just bad programming. Earlier this year when I would get this message, I would wait a minute and it would always start up on the second try. Since I have installed a SSD hard drive on my Win 7 Pro 64 bit system with 6 Gigs of Ram, this error has not happened. By the way, since I have installed the SSD, my system is ready to go from a cold boot in less than 1 Minute.

I am fairly sure that if you have a gun store and a firing range that you will have employees !

1. If capital invested, time actively involved etc are disproportionate, you can do special allocations of profit, loss and any of the other tax items specifically listed on the K - 1s. 2. If real estate is held inside a corporation it's distribution is at FMV, whiich may trigger unwanted gains. 3. Corporations are required to have annual Board Meetings and minutes while LLC are not. The best of both worlds is to set up an LLC and elect to be taxed as an S Corporation. Conversely, LLC case law is still a work in progress, so incorporating gives more certainty as far as risk and asset protection.

The only way that kind of money could be saved would be to pay an "unreasonably low salary" ! The only other avenue would be a Regular C Corp, maxing out all the fringe benefits.

Actually, some payroll processers have the ability to generate the ACH direct deposit information, which you then trnamit to your own bank to push the deposits to your employees bank accounts at the end of the same day as your paychecks are issued, in this case Friday Of course most banks that can do this will charge a fee for doing it. This eliminates the third party lag.

Copied from Accounting Today: Colorado law requires out-of-state sellers making sales to Colorado residents to report certain information to the Colorado Department of Revenue, even when the out-of-state seller does not have nexus with the state. This law was originally enacted in 2010 but was effectively on hold while the law was challenged in the courts. The court cases challenging the law have become final, and Colorado is now permitted to enforce the law as written as of July 1, 2017. The law applies to “non-collecting retailers” with total gross taxable sales to Colorado of $100,000 or more per year. “Non-collecting retailers” are out-of-state sellers who do not have physical presence in the state of Colorado, and therefore have no requirement to collect and remit sales tax on their sales to residents of that state. The law imposes three requirements on “non-collecting retailers” making sales to Colorado residents: Sending a “transactional notice” to Colorado purchasers letting them know that they may be subject to Colorado’s use tax. Sending an “annual purchase summary” to Colorado purchasers who buy more than $500 in goods from the retailer with the dates, categories, and amounts of purchases, reminding them of their obligation to pay use taxes on those purchases; and Filing an annual “customer information report” with the Colorado Department of Revenue listing their customers’ names, addresses, and total amounts spent. Penalties for failure to comply with these requirements can be significant. First that I have heard of this. If other states follow suit, this will create a whole new reporting regime. Is anyone aware of other states requiring this reporting ?

I do payroll processing and I am not aware of any laws, rules or regulations that cover this, so yes they can. The only rule my state has in this area is that your pay periods have to remain consistent i.e., you can't play games by moving the dates around. For example, I used to have a payroll client who had multiple Espresso Drive Thru s, who were paid on a biweekly basis, with the pay period running Sunday thru Saturday. However the paychecks weren't issued until the second Friday after the end of the pay period which was 13 days later, which was done consistently for almost 20 years.

I don't take credit cards, but if I did ( based on several clients very positive experience ) I would use Square.

I believe the IRS Budget has been cut for the last 5 years in a row now and now has 11,000 fewer employees, whom are mostly retiring baby boomers who were the most experienced senior employees. It likely will get much worse than it is now.

According to The Tax Book, " The transaction is treated as a sale of the property which may result in a gain or a loss, unless one of the exceptions to the inclusion of cancelled debt income applies. " Suggest you read Pub 908, Bankruptcy Tax Guide.

If there is any tax due wouldn't it be for recapture of depreciation instead of capital gain ?

"We delivered strong improvement in revenue, profit and cash flow," McKinstry said in summarizing the first half performance. Profit of about $314 million represented an increase of 33 percent over the first half of 2016. Revenue for the most recently ended period of roughly $2.57 billion rose 6 percent over last year's corresponding period. The figures were up 4 percent in constant currencies and 2 percent organically. The company reported 3-percent organic growth in its Tax & Accounting and Legal & Regulatory operation." It would appear that CCH has the cash flow to fix some of the problems at ATX, if they had the desire to do so ?

If you still haven't renewed with ATX, just was told that the Sales Reps won't be able to offer the May discount after August 31st.

If you are down to just a few returns, your lowest cost option might be Tax Act.

At this income level, you should be looking at is a custom designed pension plan.

If you haven't renewed with ATX yet, just be aware that your sales rep still has the ability to offer your the same discount that was offered to you in May. Twice in the last 5 years, I received the May discount when I renewed in November. My sales has told me that he can hold open my discount until I decide.