Catherine

Limited to profit, and if they end the business without using it up it gets lost.

Yes. Yes, they do. My daughters term it "little old Italian lady" smell because ALL of the elderly aunts drench themselves in gag-me perfume. You should hear my girls' tales of getting buried in perfume when my grandmother died and they got tightly hugged by all the little old ladies there, nearly to the point of Rita-hugged! "Near-death by perfumed bosom" is one of their nicer terms for that ordeal.

Impresses the clients?

I'll chime in with something that came in just this morning. Long-time clients, married couple; they do online training of some kind. C-corporation for years and a couple of years ago made a (late) election for S-corp status. So now they need the corporate return done before they can do their personal. They were warned about this before they made the S-election. We do the corporate return only; they (he) do the personal returns themselves using Ttx. What they send in every year is a home-brew spreadsheet that comingles balance sheet and income statement items. They don't peel out their asset purchases (technology related, computers, telecon equipment, etc) but those have to be excavated from the charge card spreadsheet they also send. Their payroll gets done by a big bank (of amerca; shh I didn't say that) and always has to be checked for over-contributions to 401k's because the pr processor allows those to go through. Then they always want to see if there are any last-minute changes that can be made (additional company contributions, something). So late last night they send in an email. "Hi Catherine, Hope you are doing well. I wanted to alert you to the fact that we are applying for our daughter's middle school application this year and the schools we have applied to need a copy of our personal 2017 tax returns. That means we have to file our personal taxes by April 15. I believe our [company name] taxes impact our personal taxes so we would like to have everything in order prior to the April 15 deadline. I will work on sending you our [company name] financials over the next few days. Please let me know if you have any questions/concerns regarding this." March 1st. They'll send in info "soon" which traditionally means a week or three. Can we have it done and back immediately. Candidates for Rita-hugs!

@jklcpa don't we ALL do that from time to time? Mis-read, mis-understand, conflate with a similar-but-different situation we've seen before, and then post in accordance with what we think we understand? 'Salright. We all still love you.

First of all, get the Bursar's Office statement. What the 1098-T and the 1098-Q say do NOT match up. If a scholarship paid all but a couple hundred of "amounts billed" then why a gross distribution of $14,100? There is information missing here that is crucial. Does that "amounts billed" field only include costs NOT paid by the scholarship? Were education funds (529, Edu IRA, whatever) used to pay private housing instead of campus housing? Start there. Then we can help you figure out which payments qualify for what treatment, and if taking some of the 1098-Q money as taxable then makes the family eligible for credits.

I had a company that was almost a year late with the S-election form. It went through, no questions. Just some scolding of the client from me... not that it helped this particular group.

Legal fees are deductible when paid to protect sources of income. We don't know all the details of this case, but depending on what the other family member originally demanded, it could well be that these fees (or some part of them) protected the income source.

I scanned my signature and added it to Adobe as a "custom stamp" that I can put on any document, just like a watermark. And I can adjust the size to fit the space.

And lemme know if you need an MA insurer EIN. I have a list of just about all of them.

If it's a local (Salem Five, Belmont Savings, Rockland Trust, Winchester Savings... etc) it's a no-brainer. Ditto the nationals; none of the big ones (BoA, Wells Fargo, Citi) are MA-based. Else go to the home page of the bank in question and under "Contact Us" it always gives the headquarters. Some years ago I was surprised that Citizens is based in RI; there are so many branches and it acts local. I guess it is, but not MA-chartered. If it's so little interest and not instantly obvious, assume not.

You got most of it. Insurance EIN (I have 'em all) and subscriber number for the MA health care form. Apportion socsec tax (read it off the MA W-2). Don't forget the $3,000 adjustment to income for rent paid on first page of Form 1. And the deduction from interest income for the first $100 ($200 for a couple) of interest from MA-chartered (not just located) banks.

Not looking at the phase-out limits, what did dad's trust NOT pay? Books, required fees, anything else required and eligible for credits that was not the $5,500 tuition?

If there is ANY history whatsoever of prior tenants that trashed the place, that also supports giving a GOOD tenant a discount. A good long-term tenant who treats your property well is worth a LOT of money to any landlord. And extra couple thousand a year is nothing if a jerk does $10K of damage.

What we do is scan everything, and return originals to the client as soon as possible. The only paper we keep is interview notes (one sheet of paper) and signature pages. Even those get scanned at season's end and the originals shredded. We have locking filing cabinets that all client documents get stored in. Two offices; the main office is alarmed and is very secure (it was a former police station). Secondary office (my house) is also alarmed. All the pdf documents are stored on encrypted drives. Without the passphrases, anyone who steals the drive just has gobbledygook, not data. Massachusetts' rules are that everything not being immediately used *must* be under lock and key at all times. As is usual with one-size-fits-none regulations, rules that make sense in a big office with common desk areas also apply to me if I am alone in my house and just want to duck to the kitchen to rinse out my teacup.

Massachusetts makes it *very* hard to change domicile. Not as bad as NY, thankfully.

Trickier than you might initially think. OP said joint checking - so technically, all funds that go in there belong to both. But it may also be that only one really funds the account, so you could also rightfully say it's the funder's money regardless of whose name(s) are listed. The long and short of it, though, is if they both own, both liable for costs, then they can jointly decide who claims what. As long as they agree, and no fraud of any kind is involved, that's copacetic.

What I say in the privacy of my own office is only subject to my own soap! Not outside sanctions!

Gail is correct; I had not even thought of eitc in this instance. I figured it was just wanting to get the most bang for their deduction buck. If he's the higher earner, he's probably paying most of the expenses anyway.

Possi is right - but they could also deduct the cost of any freebies they give out - including promotional CD's.

If they agree, I believe they can split the expenses however they want. I'd get it in writing, though, "For 2017, Joe will claim all the mortgage interest and property taxes."

I'm here. Got a triple-whammy going. Corporation client has an IRS audit *this* Friday, and I have to be 100% prepared for that. Older daughter is selling her condo, an hour away. She works 6 days a week and needed help packing and doing inspector-recommended repairs. Guess who got to help (I've spent four or five days up there in the last couple of weeks). My church lost our building and had a day and a half to get ALL our records out. Many of them are now sitting on my office floor, making havoc with all the other tidbits left over from when I moved my office in December. Part of this is having to reconstitute our bookkeeping system and stay on top of all the bills, payments, wages, and payroll taxes, in an office where all the required documents are buried in one of several boxes stuffed together willy-nilly. So I haven't been spending much time on the board. I miss you guys and hope to be back more next week!

Sorry it was so late; was out of my office all day Friday, and spent much of Saturday at a funeral for someone I once worked with. Did not know him particularly well, but he was a good guy (and younger than I am!). Then Sunday I was exhausted and took the day off.

I may be chiming in too late, but here goes. MA gives a deduction from income for socsec/medi taxes paid - but only on MA-source income. Limited to $2K, too. So that's why they give you the warning to adjust that deduction. As for the dividends and interest - that's harder, because I now use Drake and not ATX. In Drake, it's easy to over-ride the int & div income for a state, or code it to a specific state. Hope this helped.

More than that; I recall conditional TRIPLE negatives. As for study time, I spent six intense weeks studying for all four parts. S-corporations and partnerships were returns I had never seen, so I gritted my teeth and spent extra time on those. If I recall, those sections resulted in my lowest scores - but still above the passing grade. What Sara said about learning to approach the questions is spot-on. Take the time to read them carefully and make sure you understand what is being asked! Figure the answer, then see if it's listed. If it's not, there are three possibilities: that you mis-read the question, that you don't know how to answer it, or that the correct answer is NOT one of the choices (and there were, when I took the tests, about 10% of total questions that fit that last one). If you satisfy yourself on choice 1, pick whatever looks most reasonable and move on.