Catherine

Yet another case of the answer hiding until you break down and ask for help. We've all been there.

Magic words! I had an insurance problem (decades ago) that was completely unsolvable until I spoke the miracle phrase "I will call the insurance commission" at which point resolving the problem became trivial and immediate. I have *never* forgotten that.

Yikes!

I figured they did "eeny, meeney, miney, moe" and I just got skipped. LOL.

I do some (and what I've learned from Eric has been super-helpful). I am expecting that in the next year or three we will see a huge uptick in representation work, between the PPP and EIDL and stimulus payments and unemployment and trust fund taxes and missed estimated payments and... and... and... Anyway it looks like it could be bad, and forewarned is forearmed.

I got one a couple years ago and wasn't chosen. So yes, but no.

Reported CPE hours. Judy beat me to posting the next online classes (THANK YOU, @jklcpa for doing that). It was a busy day. They have an interesting attendance scheme, too. Instead of survey questions, they post key words. You get a link at session end to enter those words, and your certificate gets sent within a few minutes of entering the key words. The biggest problem they have is certificate emails ending up in spam filters. With the longer sessions, you get your credit as of the minute they issue the last key word, but Eric will frequently stay on the webinar for any questions people have, and he will stay on until every question has been answered. Today's class went a half-hour over, and I kept listening because the questions were so good!

And I just heard today that Fresno is likely to close again; they had a spike of wuflu cases shortly after re-opening. Better yet: let's CANCEL 2020 and just coast until next year!

For anyone who does ANY kind of representation work, may I recommend the Green & Sklarz (tax attorney) webinars? A lot of the short ones (one and two hour) are FREE, and they have four-hour in-depth webinars on audits, OICs, and more.

I do it manually using the program. Put in current tax year (2019) with day-month. Get depr figure; write down. change date to 2018, get prior-year figure, write down. Rinse and repeat until done; add the results. Annoying, but I can get it done through the program in far less time than it takes me to set up a spreadsheet.

Old perhaps, BulldogTom, but NEVER unworthy!

That will be months. Guess I'll handle it as an amended return. Thanks!

How nice! - NOT. Grrr! Thanks for the warning.

Client whose return was final and submitted over a MONTH ago now sends a new 1099-MISC with over $10K income. Is it possible, this year, even to do a superseded return? Or are we stuck amending, later, (maybe even by e-file)? Now I will take a minute to grumble about these nincompoops - apparently they KNEW about this, and expected it, but said nothing to me and cheerfully accepted the final (now not-final) returns, signed on penalty of perjury, and let me submit them. I think their bill just went UP substantially.

I already have almost all my cpe hours for the year, and have been pondering what else to do. This year there are a slew of excellent short courses all online that I've found really useful. Maybe I'll take a look at the course listing.

Dissenter was built off a basis of the Brave browser, but with extra features for both browsing and safety. I like it a lot. The people who created it are fiends for safety and privacy.

Due to changes in a partnership, a taxpayer needs to amend the 2018 return. I have the work all done - but what do we do? I've checked the IRS page on what they are and are not doing, and the only item listed about amended returns was for businesses. I can't even find if the Kansas City MO office is working at any capacity. Are they accepting amended returns by mail at this point? Should we hold off and see if they actually come up with 1040X e-file this summer? Advice? Comments? Amusing anecdotes? TIA!

I use the Dissenter browser; it's based on Brave, but with even more security and privacy features built in. Including built in ad-blocking, VPN, and (if you're interested) Tor browser. The only issues I've had has been TOO much security on rare occasion; I've had to lighten up the security features on a couple of sites for them to work properly.

Snitched from another group: Remember in January when we thought this was going to be a crazy tax year because they made more changes to Form 1040 and W4? If we only knew.......

The continent is not as wide as you think, Tom! LOL; that was a good one. I appreciate the laugh. And I just can't help it if the rest of you are all over-sized!

For anyone else still wondering - it's the D2 screen. Sorry I didn't see this before; I've been really lax in checking in here.

Not crazy at all. I think about it as well. Frankly, I use encryption because the state will come after ME if client data is breached. If I have done everything on their little checklist, I am off the hook as far as state prosecution goes. Since I am not fond of either orange or jumpsuits, that is important. For the actual consequences of data breach, I have cyber insurance. There's only so much we CAN do. Belt, suspenders, duct tape, and staples. So, secure networks, no broadcast of wifi (ours requires the MAC address of a device to be entered in before it will admit its existence, then asks for password), encrypted drives, encrypted back up both local and cloud. Deleting any email that contained sensitive information (after printing to pdf), plus telling client first to delete it themselves and next never to do that again. After that, there's nothing in my control.

What to do next depends on how much the gain is with $0 basis, and how much effort the client is willing to put in to track it down, and how the stock was acquired. I had one client who had inherited stock from a grandparent who died in the early 70's. We had solid starting basis from that, and with the help of a broker traced the original stock through splits and spin-offs. It took hours - and the client gladly paid me for those hours tracing and calculating. Another client had no recollection, the total amount of sale was small, and he decided not to bother. As others have said, it is the client's responsibility to give you the information. If you're going to get dragged in to calculations, it still has to be based on information the client finds somewhere, you need to be paid separately from tax preparation, and it's not going to be cheap.

Just put in the number and ignore the formatting.

MA has a funny system; they tell you (if you call) that they have NO access to prior-year withheld tax figures. However, if you file a prior-year return and make an educated guess as to tax withheld, somehow they can ALWAYS tell you how close you were to the actual. So what we've always done is make our best guess at state tax withheld (for W2s, anyway) and file 'em. But yes, it would be lovely if the IRS could get that info. After all, for some people the state income tax is still a useful deduction on Schedule A - it's an important figure, even for the IRS.