Lee B

I do payroll processing and i have been evaluating different programs for the last several years.

You are going to be hard pressed to do it much cheaper than $ 800 per year given your clients desires.

The biggest thing your client could do to impact the cost would be reduce her paycheck frequency

down to monthly.

As a practical matter research over the last 50 years shows that given the opportunity between 10 to 15 percent of employees

will steal. I personally have been involved directly and indirectly in over a dozen employee theft investigations over the years.

In most cases they were opportunity thefts i.e., it was too easy to steal. The 10 to 15 % ratio holds true thru small business, big business, non profits and governmental agencies. The IRS is no different. It's great to say, "They should be held to a higher standard" but human nature says it's going to happen everywhere. Anyone remember the Secret Service party in Columbia

that got totally out of control.

ATX offers a deferred payment plan in the fall, where you pay a processing fee and then they charge your credit card in December for the balance, which I did several times. The last two years, I waited until the last minute, made a down payment in January and paid the balance in February.

My server retry problems went away after the last update, the first week of April. After April 15th, I didn't use the program again

until the end of April, when I had caught up with my write up and payroll. When I started using the program at the end of April the

"Server Retry" issue returned every time I open the program after booting up. I've never had it happen after the program is open.

My computer is a Win 7 Pro standalone with 8 Gig of RAM and the only thing that it's used for is to run ATX. The only programs

on my computer are ATX and the other stuff necessary to run ATX. The only thing that changed on my system between April 15th

and the end of April were the weekly Win 7 updates from Microsoft. I have to assume that ATX program is still very sensitive

to any changes to the it's operating environment. The only thing I wish for next year is " Make ATX more stable" !

I believe that, given the current situation in Congress, that IRS support for Tax Professionals

will slowly wither away to a much lower level. The IRS can't do more when they have fewer

employees every year.

Then the majority of the fees would be allocated to Goodwill.

This is not quite this simple. First is this a single member or multi member LLC.

Second is whether it's a good idea to combine i.e., I believe it's called an "election to aggregate".

Also "material participation rules" and "passive loss rules" also come into play

There are pros and cons to doing so. I think some research and in depth study is called for in this case.

I sure some of members which have more experience in this area will respond in more detail.

Exactly, my daughter who is a Registered Nurse and employed by a hospital receives a Tax Free Reimbursement

for graduate level classes she is currently taking. The tax free reimbursement is for less than 100 % of the tuition.

These fees are really associated with the purchase of the assets. So the fees could be allocated to the specific assets and then

depreciated. If any of the fees are associated with a loan or a purchase contract they could be capitalized and amortized over the life of the contract or the loan.

Perhaps I'm not reading this correctly, but how can this be a 1031 exchange if LLC # 1 has direct access to the proceeds.

I think the quote is, "There are lies, damned lies and statistics"

ATX offers the deferred payment in the fall, where you pay a processing fee, and balance of the payment is deferred to December

with no discount. The last two years, i've waited to the last minute and paid about a third in January and the balance mid February.

Also, Microsoft has committed to supporting Win 7 until 2020.

I have a similar Dell with 8 Gig of Ram, which I am very happy with.

Try clearing your browser cache and your browser history and see if that makes a difference

Microsoft is releasing a security update for Internet Explorer that closes a gap that allowed attackers to take complete control of a computer. It also issued the update to Windows XP users, despite dropping support for the older operating system last month.

The update will go live at 10 a.m. Pacific time Thursday.

Adrienne Hall, general manager of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, said in a statement that the company decided to fix the problem quickly for all customers, saying it takes the security of its products "incredibly seriously."

Microsoft reported the problem Saturday, saying it was aware of "limited, targeted attacks" and that the vulnerability affected Internet Explorer versions 6 through 11

The company said users with automatic updates enabled don't need to take any action

For a fairly extensive list of what sites were or weren't affected by "Heartbleed"

click on this link http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/

REDMOND, Wash. (AP) — Microsoft says a security gap in Internet Explorer could allow an attacker to take complete control of a computer if the user clicks on a link to a malicious website.

The vulnerability affects versions 6 through 11 of the Web browser.

Microsoft Corp. said Saturday that it was aware of "limited, targeted attacks" that tried to exploit the security gap. The company is working on a safety fix which it will provide in an upcoming software update.

In the meantime, Microsoft encourages customers to enable a firewall, apply all software updates and install anti-malware software.

I prefer Firefox with Google Chrome as a backup.

I will wait until the last minute before I renew. Their discount isn't enough to renew early.

I haven't received anything

I think we should start a top ten list of ways to avoid an IRS Audit.

I will submit mine later after thinking about it some more.

According to the latest numbers 30 % of all business and governmental computers

are still running on XP.

I just received a call from ATX support. While the she did not know whether or not ATX used

OPEN SSL, she said that the ATX tech staff have been testing all of their sites and so far they had found any risks to be concerned about and everything was OK.

I have asked ATX for an official response to whether our and our clients information is exposed

to Heartbleed and whether or not ATX uses OPEN SSL. I encourage all of you to ask your tax software

provider that question. (Hundreds of thousands of websites are currently using OPEN SSL)

This is old news.

The new today says that the SSA has pulled back from doing most of this stuff.