Tax Prep Season is now upon us! If there’s one thing that people hate thinking about, it’s getting ready for tax season. However, filing taxes doesn’t have to be the usual hair-pulling hassle it usually is. Here to help you in preparing for tax season are four things you can do now to get started. 1. Get your paperwork in order. When you are preparing for tax season, keep in mind that you’ll need to bring your previous year’s return, your driver’s license or other ID, and your social security card. If your name has changed in the last year, maybe because you got married, apply for a new social security card now so that it reflects your new name by tax time. Returns often get rejected due to unproven name changes. Remember, you can easily find and download old bills from your Manilla account. 2. Decide: What is the best way to do your taxes , either Do It Yourself or not? Filing yourself with the help of a program like TurboTax can save you money in the short term, but depending on how complicated your return is, and how much your time is worth, a CPA could save you more money overall. In general, it’s worth hiring a CPA if you have anything other than income as an employee and itemized deductions on Schedule A ( taxes, home mortgage interest, etc. ). Consider how complicated your return will be when decided the best way to do your taxes. 3. Talk to your teen. If you have a teenager who works and will be filing a return as well, make sure you find out whether he plans to claim himself as a dependent or not. Usually, he shouldn’t. It’s rare that a teenager makes enough money that he should be claiming himself, yet returns are often rejected because both the teenager and the parent have claimed the younger person as a dependent. 4. Be patient. When preparing for tax season, it’s tempting to try and beat the rush by filing your taxes early, but you should wait until every single form you need has arrived. This is especially true for anyone who works multiple jobs and will have several W-2s arriving in the mail. It will cost you more to do an amended return, so sit tight until everything arrives. Taxes aren’t fun for anyone. But if you leave yourself enough time and start getting ready for tax season with these four steps, come April, filing will be a snap. For your general information, in the United States, tax evasion is the purposeful, illegal attempt to evade the assessment or the payment of a tax imposed by federal law. Conviction of tax evasion may result in fines and imprisonment. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has identified small businesses and sole proprietors as the largest contributors to the tax gap between what Americans owe in Federal taxes and what the Federal government receives. Small businesses and sole proprietorships contribute to the tax gap because there are few ways for the government to know about skimming or non-reporting of income without mounting significant investigations. The typical tax evader in the United States is a male under the age of 50 in the highest tax bracket and with a complicated tax return. The most common means of tax evasion is overstatement of charitable contributions, particularly church donations. In short, Tax evasion is the illegal evasion of taxes by individuals, corporations and trusts. Tax evasion often entails taxpayers deliberately misrepresenting the true state of their affairs to the tax authorities to reduce their tax liability and includes dishonest tax reporting, such as declaring less income, profits or gains than the amounts actually earned, or overstating deductions. Tax evasion is an activity commonly associated with the informal economy. One measure of the extent of tax evasion (the tax gap) is the amount of unreported income, which is the difference between the amount of income that should be reported to the tax authorities and the actual amount reported. In contrast, tax avoidance is the legal use of tax laws to reduce ones tax burden. Both tax evasion and avoidance can be viewed as forms of tax noncompliance, as they describe a range of activities that intend to subvert a States tax system, although such classification of tax avoidance is not indisputable, given that avoidance is lawful, within self-creating systems. Avoid all that bullshit by getting started on your taxes early and being thoroughly prepared!
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 15:46:58 +0000
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