Catherine

I had one from a small set of utilities (no longer around, doggone it) called Desktop Dozen. If you use Adobe Acrobat, the Tic, Tic, and Calculate plug-in (from cPaperless) does paper tape calculators right there in your pdf and saves them on the page for you.

Don't we all have our humor/horror stories of the sluggards who suddenly get frantic but still dribble paperwork in at a slow trickle. If they stopped sending emails begging for updates and got the missing info to us instead, they'd be done way faster. Sigh.

I do, and I have posted the no-client version a couple of times but would be happy to do so again. I use it just for tax prep, but it certainly could be configured with whatever metric you want to track. What it does not do is warn you of deadlines looming.

Remember to tell them to blame their legis-vermin - not you - for the delay, aggravation, and cost.

@michaelmars I do believe so but am not on the right computer at the moment. Catherine

There is a stand-alone called "FileInTime" that is low cost and may be useful to you.

Not only -- they work on the scared, too. The very success of these scams is a testimony of the mean-spirited and over-eager tactics the IRS has used in the decades of its existence. If they were not ham-handed and holding a well-deserved reputation of unreasonableness, these scams would NOT work. (That does not mean crooks would not find another way to scam people; they would. But it would take more effort on their part to succeed in stealing.)

Any idea how this is handled in the ACA clawback rules that are phasing in? Where the estate is tapped to recover Medicare costs in the last years of life? Is the value considered to be pre-reverse-mortgage or post-reverse-mortgage? That could push the heirs from "we need cash to payoff this loan" to "we need cash to payoff the loan AND pay back medicare for dad's last two years of medical costs - crap, we're in deep doo-doo!"

I wonder if it would have been different had the calendar been contemporaneous. After all, mapquest or google maps miles do NOT change (very much, unless a major road washes out) from year to year to the same destination. Heck, I have printed out contemporaneous maps that are unusable a day or two later if the trip happens to be on a wet or snowy day and the stupid map gets dropped in a puddle.

At least one office supply company still sells it; I bought a new package of 100 sheets just a couple of months ago. We use it in our pistol matches to make two copies of the score sheet at once.

Then you get to get up close and personal with Form 3115. Assuming you actually want these clients...

Any time spent wasting their time is time they can't be stealing from some poor terrified elderly person!

@jklcpa I will tell my husband this evening!

So my husband often says that this would be a GREAT science fair project; Just HOW happy ARE clams? And how can one tell? They make jokes about engineers, too. ;-)

I had a robo-call message on my machine a couple of days ago. This one was different! At the end of the "you have a fraud case and the IRS is going to arrest you unless you call blah-blah" the robo-voice ended with "God bless you" -- now THERE is proof the IRS did not make the call!

Well, yes. But what I frequently do is make a note of what needs investigation, to be done in a non-time-crunched period. To get to that spot, though, sometimes I just need something that *works* for when I know what the result should be and just can't get it there.

I am a Drake user as well. Put it on a dividend screen and check the box that says no 1116 is required. Make sure you put foreign income in the div/qualdiv boxes up top or it won't flow through.

I do, too! That really was one of the *best* movies ever. Right up there with my other favorites, "Real Genius", "Undercover Blues", "Joe versus the Volcano" and "Amazon Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death".

Has gone to join Gilda Radner. RIP, Doctor Frankenstein et al.

We need Maxwell Smart's "Cone of Silence" for all our conversations! Who remembers "Get Smart"?

Good point.

I had one of these calls on my office voice mail this morning. But there was a NEW twist -- it was a robo-call! A *very* electronically-generated-sounding voice left a message about my non-response to the IRS over a fraud case and since I did not respond they had issues a warrant for my arrest. Please call number boopedy-boop immediately. I need to put that on my web site as the latest twist, warning people. And I saved the voice mail in case it is useful to someone somewhere.

That's when you turn the ringer off at night and set the message machine to scold fiercely.

Let us know! We have digital phone lines thru the cable company but not VoIP.