Tax Season update.

It is a very challenging tax season. Delayed refunds seem to be the norm right now.

Frustration is my middle name.  I am not the only one.  In an unusual posting, the IRS alerted taxpayers and professional practitioners last week that the Where's My Refund? feature and other related applications may not be available due to the extra-high volume of inquiries during the Presidential Day holiday. To avoid disruptions, the IRS requested that taxpayers check on their refund status only once a day.  It didn’t matter.  Their website was down most of the weekend and remains an unreliable source of refund information. The warning is now a permanent posting on their website.  What was once touted as an improvement appears to nothing but wishful thinking on their part. As a side we can access our own internal database for you to check on the status of your tax return with apparently more reliability than you can through the IRS website.  

We continue to encounter rejected e filed returns for no reason. Just last week IRS allowed us to file personal returns with education credit forms.  However, as quickly as they announced the acceptance of these returns, they then emailed me to announcing that additional time will be required to process these returns as they work out the bugs.  They fixed it last week finally.

Forms required to file your business return appear to be almost ready to be ready to be released to file by IRS. The AICPA trade group just released an open letter to the IRS concerning “the impact the delays in forms releases will have on the processing of partnership, S corporation, C corporation and other business returns due on March 15.”  They have requested an elimination of late filing penalties.  Perhaps responding to the growing pressure from the tax practitioner community the IRS has finally announced that they will be giving us a go ahead to file returns that contain the delayed forms sometime this week.     

Despite the problems we are steadfast in our commitment to ensuring that through this unusual, time-challenged tax season, we will continue provide you with the high-quality product and service you expect.

Important information about your Corporate Income Tax Return.  The due date for your corporate 2012 is March 15, 2013.  My office will file an automatic six month extension on your behalf prior to that date.

If you haven’t started assembling your 2012 tax information now is probably a good time to get started April 15th is closer than you think.  Back in October I wrote “corporate extensions ended last month and I spent the last few weeks preparing and filing returns for the remaining stragglers.  I have to tell you how amazed I was to find people starting to organize last years’ figures, some that were incurred more than 19 months ago.  I don’t think I can remember what I spent last week let alone more than a whole year and an half ago.  In the old days we built our business on bookkeeping....an era before desktop computers and the internet.  Nowadays the computer has revolutionized your small business recordkeeping.  Here are three options, all involving computers, you can try to make things a little easier.  Don’t struggle.  Don’t miss out valuable deductions.  Make record keeping part of your daily routine.”

If you are looking for some help putting together your business information I strongly suggest that you check out our blog post from October 1, 2012.  I will post a link to that post again on our blog.

One additional note we anticipate a big crunch this year come April 15th.  We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Our office hours remain extended until April 15th.  We are open Monday-Thursday 9-7, Friday 9-5, Saturday and Sunday 10-1.  Weekend hours are subject to change based on workflow.