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Most Recent Posts

Stop Calling It Tax Day

Stop Calling It Tax Day

Tax season and the focus on “the fifteenth” has other pernicious results.  Things that are really important that don’t have an externally imposed deadline attached to them are put off until “after the fifteenth”.  And “after the fifteenth”, there is a tendency to operate at a lower rate of urgency.  And the real nightmare is very complicated returns that slip past the due date through no fault of the firm.  It can end up being almost impossible to get them prioritized since being “already late”, they are of lesser importance than other returns that can be “on time”.

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Some Tips For The Upcoming Tax Deadline – No Fooling

Really.  If there are still issues that prevent you from filing an accurate return, next week, put together a good extension calculation, file the extension (Form 4868) (You may have to also file some state extensions), and relax. Most of the tax season drama is, well, drama.  One thing that tax professionals will never admit – even to themselves – is that they actually like tax season.  They have a job that is rather tedious, not at all dangerous, and not really that challenging intellectually.  Tax season drama creates a sense of camaraderie and makes them feel special.

Among the people who should definitely extend this year are those affected by the Bitcoin hard fork in August.  Also if you are party to a deferred like-kind exchange and have not closed on the replacement property, you must extend to have the full 180 days.

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If You Held Bitcoins In 2017 Put Your Tax Return On Extension

If You Held Bitcoins In 2017 Put Your Tax Return On Extension

You send the public identity of your accounts to Node40 or bitcoin.tax or libratax.com and they produce a capital gains schedule for you.  Perry says you should definitely use Node40.  They are better because they use specific identification.  He admitted that if I called up any of the other companies (there are more than the three I mentioned), they will have a story about why they are better.  My advice at this point is to shop around and do an assessment as to whether the report you get seems to make sense.  Here’s the thing.  If you go to this trouble and report something you will probably be in the top tier when it comes to compliance.  If your transaction volume is not very high, you should be able to do it yourself.

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Why President Trump’s Rich Friends Might Have Been Mad About The Tax Act

And then we come to acquiring a building.  You and I each acquire $2,000.000 properties to run our business out of.  In both cases the land is worth $500,000.  You hire a cost segregation specialist to break out the five and fifteen year property.  So maybe 30% of your $1.5 million in basis is depreciated more rapidly than the excruciatingly slow 39 year life that a building is written off over.  Being penny wise and pound foolish, I begrudge the few thousand dollars to the tax savvy engineer.  Does that mean that I have elected to depreciate the whole smash over 39 years?

Not in so many words, but that is effectively what Mr. Egerton and Mr. Weissenberg say is the case from a practical viewpoint.  Why can’t I relying on the Cohan rule and do a kind of back of the envelope computation?  If my client gets audited, let the IRS send in their own engineer.  How wrong can it be?

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Stormy Daniels And The $130,000 – Based On Agreement, I Call It Capital Gain

I’ve been able to come up with three possible positions I would have taken on Stormy’s return.  This is the type of thing that would have made for a great tax season at Joseph Cohan & Associates in the 1980s, when we could still smoke in the office and before the Clarence Thomas hearings had introduced an almost Victorian propriety into office environments.  First, a little background.

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