FreedomTaxed

I ran the ATX2013 admin console, and chose the "file settings" tab. The backup frequency is right there, and I set it to "Daily" instead of "Hourly". I've been deleting the excess saved database folders.

The perils of our company's learning curve, I suppose. 

I took a closer look and found ATX2013 was making a new backup of itself every hour, since 2014-12-06 (when we installed the new server), meaning it's made over 2800 copies of itself.

I'm calling tech support to get this feature turned off.

Well, tech support doesn't know what I'm talking about, Jack. Here's what my D: drive on the server looks like:

D:ATX

D:EMPLOYEES

D:SCANS

The EMPLOYEES and SCANS folders are only 10-11 GB.

...

I did an investigation just now and determined that the D:ATX2013BACKUPDATABASE folder is now 748GB. That's 3/4 of the entire drive. The darned thing is making an entire copy of its database every day or so.

I'm going to call back and ask 'em how to turn that off.

Invariably my diet during tax season sucks. I have to resort to popping vitamin pills, since at the end of a 12hr day at the office, I look back and find that I ate:

1. Tea and cookies. Sugar in the tea, of course.

2. A burrito.

3. Some potato chips.

4. Soda.

5. Bottle of water.

6. Kit-Kat bar from the client bowl.

For a time I was preparing salads by hand every day, then it just got too busy. Then when it slumped, I was out of the habit. At best I was sprinkling a bag of pre-cut greens over my burrito.

I lose weight over the cold parts of the tax season since I expend quite a bit of energy keeping warm when I go home, after being on-the-go during the day.

We came in a few days ago and ATX 2014 wouldn't roll over. Then we noticed ATX 2011 said it had run out of disk space. "There's lots of space on that drive" I had thought. I checked and all the free space was gone. It's a 1 terabyte drive! The employee share was only 4GB, and the scans were about the same. ATX had filled up 996 GB.

Clients were sitting there pissed, as I moved the ATX 1999 to ATX 2002 files off the server drive and set the trash bin to 10GB. At the end of these hurried actions I had 18GB free. Whew! Suddenly we could do things.

I come in this morning, a scant 2 days later, and I'm down to 4GB free.

What the heck is going on? I'm moving more ATX years onto another drive (I'm moving ATX 2003 now), but this is still a ridiculous amount of disk usage.

We hear SALY frequently for Schedule C. I've never run into the same thing for a W-2, but I haven't been at this long enough to make the claim well enough. Surprisingly, we don't get many "just use my last pay stub".

Freedom, I'd start the hiring process a lot earlier next year. Most firms around here have their staffing in place by November at the latest so that the new people are up to speed when the season starts.  It also gives time to find out who's going to work out and just who isn't cutting it.

We started our search a little after Nov 1st. Our first interview was on the 5th. Official training started 3-4 weeks later.

I don't think our timeline is at fault. What I'll try to fix next year is my failure to fix the business owner. I left all post-interview vetting efforts to her, and it's clear to me now that she pencil-whipped it all. I can't let that happen again.

I also blame myself for letting all the little indicators go by me, when they clearly told me who was a severe problem just waiting for it's time to appear. The most troublesome employee today was the one who was falling asleep during training, for example.

Next year's gotta be different, or I should just quit. There's no point in inviting cobras into your bed.

So think outside the box.  Take a chance on someone without the "right" degree (or even any degree) if they (1) know math, (2) understand they know NOTHING about the tax business, and (3) are willing to learn.

The previous business owner had always tried to hire people who didn't have tax prep experience at all. I'm starting to wonder if there was a method to that madness. There's at least the distinct possibility that they'll do what you order them to do, and your monopoly on knowledge gives your orders a natural authority.

The IRS has a website now that you can check on people.

Do you have a link to that? I'm going to need all my faculties and tools in order to wage a hiring war next year.

Anything we have that's older than our voluntary document-retention period (currently 6 years) is shredded or given back to the client where appropriate or convenient.

I can understand the IRS not divulging the information. The same laws that protect you and your tax return, protect anyone who files one, fraud or not. The key issue is, does the IRS do anything about the fraudster.

Is trading your wife in, a deductible event? Discuss it with the husband.

{runs away}

IRS Pub 334, Chapter 8, outlines how to decide if an expense can be deducted from business revenue. In general, you can deduct "[r]epairs that keep your property in a normal efficient operating condition". But you also can't deduct "[p]ersonal, living, and family expenses". This is a gray area.

TP training has nothing to do with anything, Gail, as I'm sure you know. The IRS refuses to put PTINs on hold at the efile level when algorithmic examination amply demonstrates that certain PTINs are producing a string of questionable returns; the held PTIN would automatically cause a rejection at the efile level, and that PTIN remains on hold until some sort of phone-based procedure is followed... like calling the IRS Office of Tax Preparers and having an IRS employee simply review a randomly selected questionable filing (previously accepted be efile) and giving the preparer a Pass/Fail rating. If the preparer satisfies the IRS employee that he can justify the return, then the preparer Passes and the hold is lifted. If the preparer Fails, then the hold remains, and the preparer has to go to an IRS office and essentially appeal the hold, which is a more thorough review of a randomly selected questionable filing, or two, and if that also Fails, then the PTIN is defunct for the rest of the year.

Obviously this isn't too difficult to arrange, is "fault tolerant", and it highly motivates preparers to keep their noses clean or they'll lose the PTIN for the rest of the year. Since the supply of PTINs during tax season is limited, this should be a workable system.

Alas, my biggest problem with pricing is getting employees to understand. One preparer when challenged about how he priced a client, called our pricing policies "guidelines". 

Several employees even after being trained, still had significant trouble pricing a return. We made a custom copy of the ATX "Billing" form and all it takes is a few clicks of the mouse to price the client correctly. Somehow this is too difficult. Granted, the pricing policy and billing form were designed by a couple of OCD guys (including myself), but they are no more complicated than several tax forms are already. I wish I knew why tax preparers tend to be in such a tearing hurry to get through these forms; they miss things all the time.

When I get a client or prospect on the phone, I can give them a good idea of exactly what they'll be paying for their appointment. But I just can't take every such call.

In my email with pdf (encrypted) returns for client review, I specifically state that no paper copies will be provided unless specifically requested.

That's perfectly acceptable per Pub 1345:

I/we don't use them.  Less than 1% of clients read anything we print and send to them.  Waste of time.  I print the client info page showing amounts of refunds and what is owed.  That is all the info anyone cares about.

That's pretty much the case with us. We stopped printing client letters years ago. The best we do today is to manually print their federal and state refunds or oweds on their billing invoice. I still have to field a few hundred calls over the year to check these refund amounts anyway.

Clients are very hands-off with their taxes, as I'm sure you know. We make the effort to focus their attention on what their refunds are, their vouchers, and any paper filings they have to do (largely for Ohio, it's the municipal one). Everything else is just stuffed into the document envelop and marked with the tax year and their name. Too often these are just lost or filed away, and we were doing a lot of "can you give me a copy of my 2012 filing thanks so much", etc. At least I changed that so we CHARGE ($20 per tax year) for making those copies. We stay open all year and making a few hundred copies of client filings was looking like too much of a pointless cost; we'd get a few dozen print requests in the first 3 months after giving their current year copy. We were paying for client laziness.

The late filing of W-2/W-3 forms doesn't seem to be severe.

http://www.irs.gov/instructions/iw2w3/ch01.html#d0e1889

What I don't know at all is the method of paying W-2 withholdings late, even years late.

I'm getting a little tired of hearing people blame Obama for the Affordable Care Act. I've been telling people that there are 535 people in the Congress that they've been forgetting about. As time goes on I'm apt to get a little rude about it.

I worry that they will eat up all of the equity in the house before they die. 

Uh, isn't that the point of it all? Reverse mortgages are commonly advertised as a way to get big blocks of cash from your house, and then they drop all sort of hints that you should spend, spend, spend that cash on consumerism.

Topic 515 - Casualty, Disaster and Theft Losses (Including Federally Declared Disaster Areas)

http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc515.html

It's not a limited vocabulary, it's called "waffling". That's why we perform due diligence. Without evidence of health insurance or otherwise coverage, you're supposed to ding them on Line 61 for the shared-responsibility tax.

Next year it will be even clearer: "Sir, produce your 1095-A or my tax software will ding you for $395 or 2% of your MAGI, whichever is more. Have a good day."

We just had a client who was told by her large-financial-institution that her 401k distribution was covered under the "financial hardship" wavier for taxes. And yet, the 1099-R arrives and it (1) has federal taxes withheld, and (2) is code "1". So the client insists that we can "do something" about that.  

Our efiler is suddenly seeing this rejection message, as he started efiling this morning. It's happened three times on three different filings:

If Form 2210, Part II, Line A checkbox 'WaiverOfEntirePenaltyInd' is checked, then [WaiverExplanationStatement] must be attached to Form 2210.

?