Tax Tips & News (9)

Getting to Know Your W-2 Form

5 minutes read

Getting To Know Your w2

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) requires all employers to provide employees with a W-2 form, which lists the employee’s income information for the previous year. It doesn’t matter how long you worked for the company; if you earn more than $600, your employer must issue you a W-2. If any of your wages were withheld for Social Security or Medicare, the employer must issue a W-2 no matter how much you earned. Employers are required to provide you with this...

New Year’s Resolutions to Keep Your Wallet Full in 2015

5 minutes read

Financial New Year’s Resolutions

Keeping more cash in your wallet is within reach for everybody, and it’s never too late to start. In fact, the beginning of the year is a perfect time to make New Year’s resolutions about your finances because you actually have a better chance of keeping those promises if you start now. According to Time Money, those who improve their money matters at the start of a new year tend to have more success in that endeavor than those who wait. A new study reveals...

TurboTax is Hiding Price Increase

4 minutes read

Are You Sure…You Wan’t To Use TurboTax?

TurboTax, the leading do-it-yourself tax software by Intuit, has caused an uproar with their customers claiming shady tactics of “price gouging” & “bait & switch”. Intuit has removed popular tax forms from their Basic & Deluxe programs, forcing clients to upgrade their software by at least $30 in order to have access to the same forms that were in last year’s programs:

How a Tax Loophole Allows Corporations to ‘Invert’

4 minutes read

Corporate Inversions Are Increasing Drastically

Imagine, as an American, choosing to become a teacher in Russia, or a tour guide in Italy. According to U.S. tax law, you would have to pay taxes on your earnings, just as you would if you worked domestically. Now, imagine you’re an American corporation which has just purchased a foreign company. You shift over ownership and operations to your new foreign holdings and become subject to a different set of tax laws, allowing your business to...

How Taxes on Recreational Marijuana Are Boosting Colorado’s Economy

4 minutes read

It’s Early, But The Weed Tax Is A Windfall For States

The numbers are in, and the legal sale of recreational marijuana is, by all accounts, a success in Colorado, having earned $2 million in taxes related to the sale of recreational marijuana in just the first month of 2014. Unlike Washington State, which legalized the sale of recreational marijuana in the same 2012 election, Colorado taxes marijuana at a variety of levels: there is a 10% statewide sales tax for recreational marijuana in...

The Affordable Care Act Includes a Tax on Medical Devices. Is That a Bad Thing?

4 minutes read

What’s The Big Deal About The Medical Device Tax?

Were one to listen to the bipartisan rhetoric that has been whipped up in the House against the Affordable Care Act’s 2.3% excise tax on medical devices, it’s easy to see how a relatively small tax can be enough to scare a whole lot of people. Everything from the claims of company closures to the threat of over 43,000 American jobs being shipped overseas is being blamed on this tax, so finding the truth can take a bit of digging past the...

What California and Kansas Can Teach Us about the Laffer Curve and Tax Theory

5 minutes read

The Real Laffer Curve?

Since the economic collapse that began in 2008, politicians and lawmakers all across the United States have been on the move to enact policy that will stimulate the economy and bring back jobs. Tax policy has inevitably become part of this national discussion. The Laffer Curve, an economics theory that posits that cutting taxes is beneficial for economic stimulation, has been put to the test in two real life scenarios that have played out in Kansas and California....

Will the New Congress Be Able to Make Any Progress on Tax Reform?

4 minutes read

Tax Reform? Really?

After the November 4th elections this year, it was widely expected that Republicans would take a majority in the House and Senate. Republican leaders campaigned toward victories on promises of change, though it is unclear just how much change will actually be accomplished. While the Obama administration has for years been interested in tax reform, particularly concerning American companies using a technique called “inversion” to repatriate their profits, given the GOP’s...

Giving to Charity This Holiday Season? Here’s How to Report it on Your Taxes

4 minutes read

Reporting Charitable Deductions

The end of 2014 is just days away, and if you’re like many Americans, you are planning to give to one or more charitable organizations before the new year dawns. Around 34 percent of all charitable giving is done in the last three months of the year and slightly more than half of that is during the month of December. Giving is up substantially this year over 2013, thanks in large part to the continued national economic recovery.

2015 Tax Season Delayed

2 minutes read

Filing Season Delayed…AGAIN!

R&G Brenner has just been informed by our commercial tax software provider, that the IRS has indicated that the 2015 tax season (for filing tax returns for tax year 2014) will be delayed AT LEAST until January 23, 2015. This means the season could potentially be delayed even beyond 1/23.

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