Catherine

At this point, I'm suspicious of the emails I get telling me that my e-services password is close to expiring.... at least, until I check my own, dated, records. (And the official emails do NOT include a click-link to change that pw; you have to go there yourself.)

Robin Williams once said (actually, he probably said it many times, but only once in the show I saw) that baby poo is one-half toxic waste and one-half velcro.

And that "somebody" is those of us who do pay.

Oh, now wouldn't *that* be sweet. Just think: calling and be assured of talking to someone with a clue!

That is ALWAYS the bugaboo. I have never, ever, had a balance sheet balance out properly without (sometimes a LOT) of massaging beyond the "normal" book-to-tax differences and timing differences. OTOH, it has also led me to unearth some serious errors in what my clients have reported to me, that in a Sch C would never have been noticed. It usually ends up revolving around personal loans made to the company, to get them through a cash-flow hump (or vice-versa), that is later forgotten about.

I have not used Canopy, @Abby Normal but I do have - and use - and love - THS (TaxHelpSoftware) that is similar. It has fewer functions, for significantly less money. *Beautiful* reports. But I have not tried it today.

Ummm.... being, in MA, let's just say "no" - but it does look good from *outside* I'll give you that. Internally it has been a disaster in many and varied ways - so yes it certainly was a prototype for the aca in that sense! I would be much more in favor of regulation (federal or state) if it actually MEANT anything. By which I specifically mean that they monitored the quality of the returns submitted, and clamped down hard and fast on any and every one whose returns are fraudulent or who is even just clueless. AND if they also had a huge PR campaign to educate taxpayers on what to avoid (not to look for). Such as "anyone who won't sign your returns - avoid" or " anyone who claims they can get you a better refund than X - avoid" etc. We've seen posts here (most recently from RitaB) where we KNOW who in our own areas are either incompetent or playing fast-and-loose (or both) and there's no point in reporting them because NOTHING will happen to them. THAT is the part that has to change for ANY regulatory scheme to be anything but a money-maker for government - frequently supported by our professional societies since they all make money selling memberships and CPE classes.

NATP has self-study classes available; check them out. They have 8-cpe-hour classes on C corps and S corps (plus partnerships). They are basic level classes geared exactly to your situation: sole-prop clients "moving up" in complexity of business structure. They may also have webinars and guided classes; I always prefer self-study. Take a look at their offerings here: https://www.natptax.com/EventsAndEducation/Pages/course-list-self-study.aspx

I have used the Chrome pdf printer to save to pdf, then print to paper from that if I want/need. I have also used my pdf "printer" installed on my machine. I admit readily that the e-services "print" function does not work very well at all; you are not the only one to have a problem with them! It has never worked for me; I always use CTRL-P on my browser and go from there.

I agree with Tom in this one. Get a POA that covers all the years - and make sure it includes provisions to discuss civil penalties - and call. May take more than one call, if you get a clueless newbie or a real hard-nose on your first try. Find out the situation, get a list of exactly what they want, transcripts, and go from there. And get paid up-front for this one; I never take a back-taxes case without payment up front. I use up the payment and there's more to do - more money, and work ceases until paid (and the check clears).

Always great if it can be done. If it wasn't done at the time, "the time" was several years ago, and the property was not sold, then it gets very messy and alternative measures may be needed. And some clients won't spring for it as a separate item; little knowing they spend nearly that much to *us* for the research we have to do to come up with something reasonable that we can defend using.

True, but I have on occasion used Zillow with a caveat. I find a same-vintage "comp", see what Zillow said it was worth, see what it actually sold for, and apply a percentage correction factor. Document everything (screen shots, etc) and detail your reasoning. Sometimes it's the best that can be done.

I did find that I had to CALL to resolve this one; repeated letters did absolutely nothing. Once I had someone on the phone, we resolved it (I hope!!!). It did take about an hour on the phone, but quite a bit of that was holding while the agent went to look up something or try to fix something. Think I played solitaire for a while, while waiting.

@Abby Normal thanks for the info on startup monitor and autoruns; I am going to look at both of them (tomorrow; today's already full).

Once it's an S-corp, it can sell shares to new shareholders as long as there is only one shareholder class and the total number of them does not go above 100. You'll need to do special allocations the first year to deal with when the new s/h came in, and remember to start tracking the basis as well.

That's a joke anyway. It gets ignored by ALL the robo-callers, and no one enforces it. So why do we even have it?

That's what must have happened to MY client! C-corp in existence since before I was born has *always* filed a fiscal year return. We got letters demanding calendar year tax returns because they "had never been filed" for like the last three years (all the letters within a week of each other), plus problems with application of estimated tax payments for the corporation. Took a LONG time on the phone to get it straight, and the IRS agent was never really able to articulate why it got messed up in the first place. We'll see for sure in October, when I file the extension request for 2016 fye 9/30/17. Thanks, Judy!

Me, too - but more and more programs are insisting that they *must* live on the C drive. So no more partition for tax software, partition for acctg software, partition for client data, etc. Next machine I'll dump the partitions and just use folders. Ah, well.

Not necessarily; depends on the details of the annuity and how much (or little) control they have. If it's the Ozzie version of social security, they don't have a foreign trust. If they an a US-style annuity (that they were required to pay into), they may have a foreign financial asset. Or they may have a foreign trust. The devil is in the details - which need to be obtained, pronto.

Jeepers, sounds like I have been involved in the wrong kind of class action suits! I couldn't even buy a large pizza with my settlement!

Great story, @JohnH! A friend spent a couple of years working out in the Marshall Islands. Depending on which direction the trip was, it either took two full days or less than one. Those flights cross the International Date Line. (Did you know that Magellan and his crew, when they got back from the first-ever circumnavigation of the world, were close to getting accused of being witches? Because their calendar was off by a full day! I forget how they got out from that one, but they did.)

I got $13 and change from a class action suit some years ago. Yeah, they sound great - but the only ones who profit, it seems, are the lawyers. Maybe the bad guy gets spanked.

What E = MC^2 means, @BLACK BART is that energy and mass are equivalent, subject to a large correction (the speed of light, times itself). So how much energy resides in a tiny bit of matter? Astounding amounts (hence the amazing destructive abilities of nuclear bombs). How much matter could one form out of energy? Teeny tiny little insignificant amounts (it does go both ways, after all, and explains the electric bills of particle accelerators). The limerick, however, addresses a fact learned from Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, which tells us that time is a PHYSICAL property. It moves more slowly with increased gravitation and with increased speed. Two cesium clocks, at different altitudes, run slightly differently (not so as we'd notice; the difference is less than a second per million years). Which one is right - BOTH are! Because time itself is different at different gravities - and higher up there is less gravity. Likewise, time slows down with increasing speed (you have to get to more than 40% of the speed of light to notice). Your link goes to the Time Dilation equation where you can calculate the effect for yourself. So if twin brothers split up, and one goes on a space journey to Alpha Centauri and comes back in - let's say fifteen years - he is a couple of years YOUNGER than his twin upon arrival home, because time slowed down for him. The speed of light is a theoretical limit (I am not going to go there, don't worry) but the limerick implies that if the barrier is broken, the girl in question can come home before she left. Great trick, as she can remind herself to bring whatever it was she forgot... no, wait, that gets us into time paradoxes. Let's not go there, either, at least right now. Relativity, Special Relativity, and Quantum Physics get weird and surreal *very* quickly - and anyone who is lacksadaisical about the implications of these principles really does not understand them at all. In fact, they are SO bizarre and ridiculous that the *only* thing they have going for them is that they are undeniably factual.

Their might be some arcane provision for working at a foreign embassy, as those are considered to be "foreign soil" once on the grounds. But just putting up a sign; nope. That's going to show up on one of the "Dirty Dozen" lists soon.

Well, yeah - but it still makes them hang up FAST. And I get to use an announcer's super-perky type of voice, too. Y'know, of the type that says "call before midnight tonight and get - for NO additional charge! - the Ronco combination turnip masher and diaper steamer - just pay shipping!"