Phony IRS scams
The IRS has come out today and publicly warned taxpayers to be wary of phony IRS audit scams. They remind us that IRS never contacts taxpayers via email or social media to initiate an audit or to correspond with you directly regarding your account. Also: IRS never asks for personal info such as PIN numbers or passwords to bank accounts. The ONLY official IRS website is www.IRS.gov. Any other website looking like or claiming to be IRS is bogus. If you receive a phone call, fax or letter from IRS and you have any reason to suspect that it is...
Think you’ve been getting screwed by IRS?
What would you do? You are minding your own business, and out of the blue you get a call from someone who claims she is from IRS, that you are being audited, and that lucky for you your case has been assigned to her. Lucky because she knows all about you and wants to get together… You’d probably ignore her. This is what Vincent Burroughs did, for a while anyway. Problem was he was being audited and she was the agent assigned. The audit ultimately didn’t go very well, and he owed money. However, he alleges that as...
Avoiding an Audit
It’s that time again, Tax Filing Season! And with it come endless questions and articles about how to avoid a costly, nerve wracking, and time consuming audit from IRS. In my many years of dealing with IRS exams it is apparent that you cannot bullet proof any tax return from selection, but there are a few simple steps you can take to lower your odds of having any entanglements with “The Man”. 1) Don’t make any mistakes. Many tax returns are selected because they are patently wrong to the casual observer. Clearly inappropriate deductions, math errors, incomplete forms or missing...
Tax Planning year end tips
Well, Christmas has passed, and that means that the next big thing coming is…. the final throes of the 2012 tax planning period. Never mind parties, football, and the Rose parade. Who can think of anything else while there is still time to do a few things that will lower your income taxes for 2012? But time is running out. If you don’t act now you may be writing larger checks come April 15! Here are a few things to consider: 1. Donations to charity this week will impact your taxes in April if you itemize deductions. Time to clean...
Tax Planning Sea Change
Each year, just in time to take the fun away from the Holidays, we reach out to our clients and attempt to project tax liabilities and recommend strategies to reduce their tax burden. It’s particularly important to think about this now, before year end, while you still have time to make changes to your tax profile. It’s an unfortunate situation when we have clients who ask us on April 15th what they can do to reduce the tax they owe. In most cases the horse is already out of the barn by then and there are few tactics we can...
Are You a One Percenter?
Do you know that old saying that figures don’t lie, but liars can figure? Well, much hyperbole came out of the election regarding who is in the top 1% of income earners, and who pays what in taxes. A lot of the stats were misused or misquoted. Here are the latest figures that IRS recently released for 2010: If you are in the top 50% of income earners, your Adjusted Gross Income (AGI, line 37 on your 1040) was at least $34,338. You paid an average tax rate of 13.1% on your AGI, and your group as a whole paid...