JohnH

I sure did my part to help get it down, as well as most of my family. There's still MUCH to be done, though.

I learn something every day, much of it from this forum. Thanks, KC.

Just wish I could say "I'm the guy in the blue uniform shirt holding the drill."

For anybody who's offended, all I can say is "You were warned in the title - 4 times".

51 cents per mile for business miles driven 19 cents per mile driven for medical or moving purposes 14 cents per mile driven in service of charitable organizations Here's the link: http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=232017,00.html

You might want to update more frequently as well, especially during these early days. I've updated three times in the past two hours, and each update contained a full screen of forms on the update manager listing. Each individual update moved fairly quickly, but I'm thinking it would have gone much slower if I only updated once. Like gail & Mike, I just keep everything updated even though I only use a few states.

We're going to start having cake on the forum? Great! I think I'll change my vote...

I have a stack of 8109-B forms lying around, if anybody needs them...

Yes, you were correct at the outset. I just broke it down into steps to see how it comes together on the forms. I have a client who likes to see how we got to the end resullt with their Nanny. ( of course, after they say they want to cover the emplyees's withholding and all, when we get through they almost always ask "That's awfully high - isn't there something you can DO about those taxes?")

Gross pay needs to be grossed up by the amount of the FICA/Med being paid by the employer, plus the FICA/Med withholding attributable to the gross up. You can use the reciprocal as a short cut to get this (100.00% minus 5.65% = 94.35%) Divide the $700.00 by 94.35% to get gross pay ($ 741.91) Multiply $741.35 by 5.65% to get FICA W/H ($ 41.91) Net pay is back to the $700.00 target ($741.91 minus $41.91) Fed Tax Due = $98.66 ($41.91 plus $56.75) (The $56.75 is the product of $741.91 x 7.65%)

OldJack's approach is the best - he should try it first. But if he can't prove he wasn't a reponsible party, he has the possible option of paying the trust fund portion of the taxes (the amounts withheld from employee wages) if the corp is going belly up. This might enable him to avoid having to pay the matching FICA/Medicare, penalties, and interest, which is the corporation's responsiblity. This is tricky, and if he doesn't do the designation strictly according to the IRS rules, he could miss an opportunity to clean up this mess with a little less pain. If he does it incorrectly, the IRS will get the matching funds, penalties, and interest from whatever the corp has, and then STILL go after him for the trust fund taxes.

I don't really care either way, provided non-tax posts are labeled (Birthday, NT, joke, politial, etc). But I voted in favor of splitting simply for efficiency purposes.

Interesting. Democrats were still the majority in the House & Senate during the lame duck session, but blame the tea party & Republicans? Now that's a stretch. This thing could have been put to bed well in advance, even BEFORE the election, if the party in power had any backbone. They were so worried about their jobs they forgot to DO their job.

Work-around on the Uni-Form. (sort-of) ATX still hasn't responded, other than the standard reply telling me to keep updating (thanks for the suggestion, as though I didn't know that). Of course, it's still early, we're just coming off the Christmas holiday, and they are chucking out form updates hourly. Anyhow, I did find that printing the instructions in half-page layout on the back of the Uni-Form sheet puts everything on the back of the employee copy only. It takes a little trial and error to get everything in the right place the first time. Don't really want to keep doing that, but for the low-volume W-2 clients it works just fine.

I updated forms 3 or 4 times today, and it seemed to be working fine. The first one was a little slow because there were lots of forms to update, but after that it was a breeze.

Terry, that was a great video. Thanks to you and to your students for a tangible demonstration of gratitude to one of our patriots. We owe all of these young men & women a tremendous debt.

Gene: An experience like that will alter your perspective, won't it? I expect you'd agree with another of Winston Churchill's famous quips, "There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at without result."

If you use extensions strategically, the due date becomes a non-issue regardless of whether it's Apr 15 or Apr 18. I always tell my clients the last person they want working on their return in early April is a harried, sleep-deprived, cranky tax preparer. (I refuse to be one of those people). Better to take the filing date off the table entirely and get the return done without deadline pressures breathing down everybody's neck.

Between the likelihood that IRS may not make their target date and the even more likely prospect of work backlogs, this is a good year to have a firm extension strategy in place. I think I'm going to set March 10 as my cutoff date - anything coming in after that date automaticllay gets an extension. Then we can sort out what actually gets filed by Apr 15 without any undue pressure. (I've also wondered if IRS might extend the Apr 15 due date for everyone anyhow, given their own time constraints. It should be easy enough to do administratively, and they can blame Congress for the delay.)

Thanks Taxbilly. Merry Christmas to you and everyone else on this forum.

I agree that it's silly, but the rules are right there in black & white and so are the penalties. And the aggravation of giving them instructions on a separate sheet of paper is way past my patience. Better to print them on the face of the Uni-Form as it's being generated and then give each employee (or contractor) a single sheet of paper with everything right in front of them. My way of doing it is employee copy of W-2's on the Uni-Form; Copy A and W-3 on plain paper, which is also acceptable by their rules. Everything is in black & white for W-2 & W-3. Contractor copy of the 1099-MISC is also on the Uni-Form and Copy A & 1096 is on Red pre-printed forms. I have one client who issues about 200 1099's - no way I'm risking a $10,000 fine no matter how remote the possibility, when all I have to do is spend $20 for the right forms. which is added to the client's bill anyhow. To each his own...

Jack: You might want to look at Publication 1141 about printing forms on plain paper. I understand that lots of employers and preparers have been getting away with using unperforated, plain paper forms wihtout the boilerplate for years. But in this current environment, with penalties moving up the list as a source of revenue, I'd be very cautious about ignoring clear instructions. Especially when the penalty can be $50 per form if they suddenly decide to make an example of you. Peronally, I'll pay 5 cents per form to avoid the remote possibility of $50 per form - that's a good investment any day of the week. ====================================================================== .05 Employee copies of Form W-2 (Copies B, C, and 2), including those that are printed on a single sheet of paper, must be easily separated. The best method of separation is to provide perforations between the individual copies. Each copy should be easily distinguished whatever method of separation is used. Note. Perforation does not apply to printouts of copies of Forms W-2 that are furnished electronically to employees (as described in Treasury Regulations Section 31.6051–1(j)). However, these employees should be cautioned to carefully separate the copies of Form W-2. See Publication 15-A, Employer’s Supplemental Tax Guide, and new Section 3 of Part B for information on electronically furnishing Forms W-2 to employees. AND ALSO: .19 Instructions similar to those contained on the back of Copies B, C, and 2 of the official IRS Form W-2 must be provided to each employee. An employer may modify or delete instructions that do not apply to its employees. (For example, remove Railroad Retirement Tier 1 and Tier 2 compensation information for nonrailroad employees

After posting my last note, I thought of something else. I use the Uni-Form 1099MISC as well, so I checked to see if it had changed. I think it has the proper layout, with the boilerplate in the upper-right quadrant. I'm going to email tech support directly and ask about this. Will post back here when I hear from them.

I was thinking along these lines. The nice thing about the Uni-Form is that you put the blank in the printer and in a single pass you get a W-2 ready to give to the employee, plus you can buy several years' worth of blanks at one time. But if you have to run it through the printer a second time to print the boilerplate on the back, you may as well just buy 3-up perforated forms which already have the boilerplate printed on the reverse side. At first I thought Karen Lee had picked up on something, but then I looked at 2009 and 2010 side by side (thank you dual monitors), and the "Instuctions" tab appears in both years. I think it's there only for printing the back side of W-2 forms other than the Uni-Form. I posted this question on their official forum as well, just to get a clarification. There is absolutely nothing that I can find in their knowledge base to alert customers to any sort of change to the Uni-Form format. I keep hoping this is something they just haven't cleaned up yet.

H-m-m-m. Sort of defeats the purpose of the Uni-Form altogether. But if that's what we have to do, then I guess we'll have to live with it. Thanks.