Abby Normal

I was discussing this at lunch and threw out $45, but that's more for low wage hourly workers, that you can do in 5-10 minutes. The problem with a flat amount per paycheck is hourly workers whose hours can vary a lot. So unless the dollar amount is prorated based on hours, smaller paychecks would get crushed.

I love that you can now just enter an amount you want withheld and not bother with the rest of the form. I tell my clients all the time how much they need withheld per paycheck and they always ask how they do that. Now they can just put that amount on a W4 and be done. It will be interesting to see the withholding calculations that accompany this. Will it be difficult to calculate manually? Married people with other income are likely not going to choose to let their employers know those amounts. I wanted a redesign of this form but this isn't it. I would have just two lines for withholding, one for dollar amount you want withheld and one for % you want withheld, and you choose whichever works best for you. I like the idea of everyone knowing what percentage their taxes actually are.

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-dft/fw4--dft.pdf

Yeah, but do we really want Amazon being our only retailer? I'm a Prime member and do buy from Amazon, but I like to support other good retailers as well. And you have to watch Amazon prices on some items, but it's a good place to read product reviews.

LLCs usually file articles of cancellation. Corporations dissolve. Almond Joys have nuts.

Monoprice has good toner prices, too. Can't vouch for quality as I've never purchased any. I found them when I was looking for cables and they had the best prices by far. https://www.monoprice.com/search/index?segmenttype=b2b&keyword=toner

You win.

You don't have to let them touch your computer, just have them in the room with you. Then fill out the form together and bill him for your time.

The only 'soft drive' I know of is in baseball. We used to have floppy disks.

Wow, those are expensive. I always buy the $100 ones. I have the HL2360 now.

Maybe you're using crappy paper. It's not good for printers.

The IRS should have cleared this up years ago by finalizing the proposed regulations. I had an audit of an LLC member who was not active in the business at all, and the IRS agreed with me that the member was not subject to self-employment (SE) tax. The agent told me that the IRS was using a 'facts and circumstances' decision making process for these cases.

https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2018/may/self-employment-taxes-llc-members.html

You should switch to SSDs. The prices have come down considerably and the performance leaves HDs in the dust.

I would hope the state calc of the penalty would be simpler than the federal one, but having prepared a few NJ returns, I'm not betting on it.

The Fingertip Tax Facts tables do too. Here's the link for the Tax Book tables: http://www.thetaxbook.com/updates/TheTaxBook/Updates/2018-01-15_Withholding_Tables_for_2018.pdf

I believe ATX does that automatically for you when you save the amended return, but I prefer it before the name so it shows in the tab at the top for open returns. Sometimes I'd have both the old return and the amended return open and it's easier to see you're in the file if it says Amended at the beginning.

If you go with 2 files, prepend the name of the original return with something like ***OLD***. Then when you sort be name, these will be at the top, and easy to uncheck if you're doing some mass process. Most ATX users only rollover clients as they come in, until it's time for extensions.

Alternately, you can just add the 1040X to the original file and not utilize the amended feature of ATX. That's what we do because we prefer to just have one file. The downside to doing this is you have to manually enter the numbers in the original column but we still prefer it. And, welcome!

You've got to be kidding me.

Qualified transportation fringe benefit doesn't include tolls, so it would have have to be additional income to the employee. The 100 + 155 pretax is the monthly limit of $255 for parking.

I've had this PDF on my desktop since January: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/n1036.pdf Shame about Ellicott City. I live near there and like to visit occasionally. Super sad that the helpful national guard man got swept away. Never under estimate the power of flowing water.

Not really. If AMT applies, they weren't deducting the 2% items anyway. Plus you can't arbitrarily go to your employer and tell them you want to be a 1099 contractor. And do you really want to give up health insurance, unemployment insurance, 401k match, etc. plus pay the employers half of Social Security and Medicare? Tax rate decreases and increased credits offset the loss of these deductions in most cases, so at least in that sense, it was a simplification. Besides, there were a lot of made up expenses in the 2% category.

I have a single parent pilot that I thought was screwed because SALT caused them to lose 7k in deductions and 2% cost them another 9k in deductions, plus they lost 12k in exemptions, so taxable income was 28k higher. Tax did go up by 5k but AMT went down by 6k. So they really just replaced the regular tax with the AMT tax which never allowed either of those deductions. And I suspect many SALT limited clients are in similar situations. And in this case, they also got 4k in child tax credits until the kids get a little older.

So true!