Tax Tuesday

Tax Tuesday

It's tax tuesday name with our accounting guru in residence, thomas, an accountant in practice, and one of the most popular folks on the college of charleston.

We want to thank you for joining us again, and how have you been holding up?

>> great.

And thank you for that awesome introduction.

>> you know you are, and i don't make light of the fact that you're one of the most popular folks on the campus of the college of charleston, and what do you teach over there?

>> i teach very different accounting courses, from the basic to the complex, and i also teach tax surprising lee enough.

So i stay a little bit busy over there you might say.

>> you certainly do, but you do it in a way that's very digestible.

And we're students too, so as we move to the tax deadline, we have a few months to organize ourselves and what should we be doing at this point now that the tax date is fast approach?

>> i had a feeling that once everybody knew that april 15th was becoming july 15th, slacker mode kicked in.

And you had other things on your mind as you were staying at home quarantining, but now is the time, if you haven't already, to start getting everything together.

You should have everything already.

Because t2s.

1099s, the 1098 from mortgage there, all of that stuff was required to be sent to you by january 31st in most case.

February 15th for certain brokerage accounts, so you should have everything that you need.

>> what if we did not get everything that we needed?

>> okay, flurry a couple of ways that you can find it.

First off, maybe you're missing something like a statement from a bank or from a lender, like for a mortgage lender or student loans.

This is a big one that people always seem to forget, and it's because a lot of lenders, a few years ago, actually started sending them electronically unless you elected to have it mailed to you, so my recommendation, check your email and see if it might be in there, and if it's not in there, go onto the website for different sources.

Get the documents that way.

>> one thing i want to say, i know a lot of offices and people to get the.

>> check the email that way, and see if you can like bono, get what you're looking for.

And we just had memorial day happen, and after memorial day, the irs starts making transcripts available on their site with everything that got reported under your social security number.

And guess who gets copied?

Friends of the irs, and right now, you can go to friends of the irs.gov and you can click on get my information, and you can download a wage earner transcript.

At this point, it's not 100% complete.

But it still gives you a good stating point to track things down, and sometimes it has all of the information you need.

Sometimes it doesn't, like if you had state income tax withheld, that's not on that transcript.

But at least it will give you a start and tell you who to contact to get an actual copy of the document to prepare your returns.

>> okay, let's troubleshoot, and we have a few seconds before we take a break, and what if your return gets rejected?

>> oh, registrations, and tax returns, they happen every so often, and there are a slew of reject codes and why the irs might reject it.

But the most common one, you keyed in a social security number wrong or you're entering your t2 information, or 1099 information, and you keyed in the employer identification number wrong.

See, the way the irs works with the electronically filed returns, they want to verify it's you.

So what they do, they match up the social security number to the first four letters of the last name associatedded with the social security number, just as a check and a balance.

And another thing, maybe you got an identity theft protection pin from the irs, and if you don't have that and you try to, it won't file t.

>>> maybe to go through a second set of eyes that we trust we have to take a break, thomas, but we want to talk about some of those covid-19 stimulus payments, >> thank you so much for sticking with us, and we have been talking with our accountant in resident, thomas, and we want to talk about those covid-19 stimulus checks, and how does that affect your filing next year?

>> it's going to affect it, and there might each be a form to fill out.

I haven't seen a draft come out yet, but.

[ audio difficulties ] the stimulus they can check you got was not just free money from the government.

>> what?

>> you see, what it was was an advance payment of a tax credit that's going to be on the 2020 return.

Going back and calculating how much you should have gotten based on your 2020 income, and then you are going to compare the amount you should have gotten to the amount that you already got.

And if you got too much, it's going to add to your tax balance next year.

The difference between how much you got and how much you should have gotten, now, if you should have gotten more, that excess amount will count as a credit to your next year's tax, so that might increase your reached or your balance too if you got too much, but if you didn't get enough, it's going to add to your tax next year.

It's going to make it more complicated so you might want to save that letter that you got in the mail because it's going to come in handy to next year's filing.

>> it helped in the interim, and probably a lot of people could have used more, but with adjustments on the back end, we want to see everybody go back to work.

Thomas, thank you for joining us and anybody who wants more information or your services personally, where do they go?

>> all of the information is on the website.

>> that's great, and we're going to check in with you again if anybody