Catherine

There is a difference between running a home-based business, for mileage purposes, and the sole-and-exclusive space requirements for the home office deduction.

The most persnickety of clients have karma attached to them, attracting mistakes on our part. Seen it time and time again over the years!

Obviously, JohnH, they did it to see if you were paying attention! Congratulations; you win the kewpie doll. Include its FMV in your income for 2022.

You might recommend to your client that they (not you!) call. I've had two clients who called; one had their refund approved but not released and it took the phone call to release the hold so the IRS would actually send the check. The other never got (or so they said) the "we need you to prove who you are" letter. In both cases, the processing would never have proceeded without the calls. But yeah, most of them are just cases of take the deli ticket and wait in line to order your half pound of roast beef.

I have a couple of clients for whom we file every year without official requirements. One wants that SOL to be started. The other lives in subsidized housing and requires a copy of her return every year to prove her continued eligibility for the subsidy. If we have to prepare it anyway, it's dumb not to file it too. I charge very little for those returns (and no charge for the 2nd paper copy for the lady getting the subsidy - and she gives it to the board, or whoever demands it).

The problem is the state in question has to approve the use of the forms. There is nothing we, the software companies, or even the IRS can do to force the states to act more swiftly

A tax attorney I know said their recommendations to pros was to wait until mid summer (when e-services was going to start using it) to give them time to work out the bugs. So I had held off. Perhaps they will go to the login.gov system that cbslee mentioned. We'll see!

I use Drake, and we're still waiting for approval on those forms in Drake as well.

It is. It's an independent online (and print!) newspaper founded by anti-CCP groups and dedicated to independent reporting. Their bias is anti-CCP and pro-Falun Gong, but they do a remarkably good job as independent and neutral news source in any other area of interest.

MA has always had major delays on its non-resident/part-year form. I'm also still waiting for Form 2 (trusts; 1041 equivalent) to be approved. Fully 1/3 of MassDOR staff are permanently assigned to dealing with wage garnishments for child support. Most of the state tax is individuals, full year, followed by businesses (Forms 355 and 355S). So that's where they put all their efforts. Once those three (Forms 1, 355, 355S) are approved, then they turn their attention to the others. All we can do is wait.

More details from ZeroHedge (quoting the Epoch Times, which requires registration but not payment). ZeroHedge on IRS and ID me

I've always added $1. I have clients living outside the USA who can exclude all earned income and don't earn interest (some European banks are charging interest to hold funds!). We add $1 or we can't e-file.

There's the hurdle. If you word it loosely enough, the kid may think it's some sort of scam and refuse to answer. You could try! Allude to some longer term connection? "We usually chat this time of year, but s/he has not answered my letter."

When software gives divergent results, the only way to do it is to research the state code and see what the rules are. I don't know the SEHI rules for CA (I'm on the other side of the country). But I bet you can look up the CA SE & SEHI rules online with the FTB - unless someone here who works with CA returns knows them off the top of their head, and chimes in.

At this point, I'm frankly surprised that recorded colonoscopies aren't available on pay-per-view, for the person of your choice.

Some years ago, I used Ruby Receptionists and was very pleased. With them (at least at the time) you could get service just for the busy months. You can also give them instructions on when to forward a call. But it's been some years (stopped after I merged with a friend's practice) so can't tell you how they're doing these days.

She wants what mama & dada have to eat *so* badly. They give her teeny tiny pieces.

Technically, you are not allowed even to admit the person is your client without a signed/dated Section 7216 Disclosure Authorization. You also have to be careful *who* you talk to for other reasons. One of my elderly clients has 3 kids; 1 close, 1 relatively nearby, and 1 several states away. The one who's close also has a history of verbal abuse! It's the one several states away who is my contact (with S7216 etc). The relatively nearby one just has no head for numbers, but at least is not verbally abusive. Did I know any of this before the S7216? Nope. Just names/addresses that were needed for a gift return some years earlier.

Maybe. I can neither confirm nor deny...

I'm not convinced they ever do anything with 941X forms. Any 941X I've ever sent in for any client was ignored totally. I think when they see the X, they ceremonially burn them without reading further than the EIN, and then send tax due notices.

Even more wonderful, because yesterday I learned that a long time friend had passed on; his heart problems caught up with him. Yesterday was a bad day, and I wandered around in a fog all day doing things poorly and eventually gave up on trying to accomplish anything.

I still have the text file; maybe tomorrow I'll have a chance to log in and run AccuWage and grab a screenshot of the error for you. I literally only have a couple of W2s and it took me a whopping five minutes to do them by hand.

Warning with BackBlaze: some colleagues near me use it, and it failed to make any backups for two weeks and never notified them of the failures. How'd they find out? Looking for a backup copy of something accidentally deleted, that was less than two weeks old. They were seriously not pleased.

@Medlin Software first error was indeed the phone number, which I fixed. Then it said something about too many characters on a line or something else. Didn't want to muck with the file and maybe really mess it up, so I just did 'em manually.

Baby granddaughter at just over 8 months old, has her first little toofie. So exciting!