New Lotto millionaire is 91 and says he lacks nothing — except maybe a wife – He made the proper, obvious, choice to take the lump sum of $10 million rather than the 30 year long payout of $16 million.

Tax Relief Did Not Cause Budget Deficits

Your Tax Dollars at Work. Rep. Jim Nussle takes on wasteful and fraudulent spending.

State budget crisis a taxing worry

Wake-Up Call on Spending

The “Party of Reagan”? – The current incarnation of the GOP is looking less and less like Reagan’s.

Old Wine in New Wineskins–Tax Seduction in Alabama

Threat to Term Limits Is Seen. An advocacy group acts to block what it sees as a plan to weaken state restrictions. – Mandatory term limits are necessary to ensure turnover in elected office and prevent the ruling elite (career politicians) from becoming even more like the royalty our founding fathers tried to protect us from.

Schwarzenegger woos key corporate donors. He vowed to ‘not take money from anyone’ – Arnold’s seems to have a good grasp on typical Kennedy hypocrisy.

Voter wrath now veering toward state Legislature – Tossing all of the rulers out of Sacramento would be a good way to start improving things out there. Most of the legislator slots could be filled from the crowd of gubernatorial candidates.

The simmering Social Security problem will boil over soon.

As I’ve always explained, the popular belief that everyone cheats on their taxes and underpays is 180 degrees off the mark. Most people don’t claim all of the legitimate deductions to which they are entitled, resulting in grossly overpaying taxes.

Financial data can be captured with a good bookkeeping system, of which QuickBooks is the easiest and most efficient.

Non-cash transactions are a little trickier to keep track of. I am constantly seeing people claim zero on their tax returns for non-cash donations. They always tell me that they did give things away, but didn’t keep track of it. What we end up doing is using guesstimates, which I am sure are grossly understated.

For several years, there has been a company that has produced a workbook called ItsDeductible to help people track their non-cash donations and assign proper values. A few years ago, they added a computerized version. H & R Block has even come out with its own version of this kind of program, Deduction Pro, selling to the public for the same $20 price.

I haven’t done a side by side comparison of these programs to know first hand which is superior. Both of them appear to produce the official IRS Form 8283 for non-cash donations, which can then be given to the user’s tax preparer.

However, the It’s Deductible has been around much longer. It was also recently purchased by Intuit, which has plans to integrate it with its Turbo-Tax programs. According to the latest news, there are no plans to have It’sDeductible integrate with Intuit’s professional tax prep programs (Pro Series and Lacerte) for the 2003 tax program; but I am hoping this can be done for 2004 because we use Lacerte for all of our tax returns.

ItsDeductible does have volume discounts for tax professionals to buy ten or more copies at a time to give or resell to their clients.

Special offer for our tax clients: We have long been trying to get more of you to computerize your records. If any of our clients are willing to use the computerized ItsDeductible to keep track of your non-cash donations for this year (2003), I will buy a bunch of them and give you the program on CD for free. If you use it properly for 2003, I will also provide you with a copy of the 2004 program, and so on. Any of our tax clients who are interested should send me a request to the top secret (currently spam free) email address that we have provided you to use in communicating with me.

Many conservatives do see Arnold as a stealth Kennedy, and he isn’t doing much to dispel that impression.

An estate tax return (Form 706) is required to be filed if the gross market value of the assets owned by the decedent, plus the total of taxable gifts made during his/her lifetime, exceeds the lifetime exclusion amount for the year of death (currently one million dollars). That in no way means that there will be any tax due because that is calculated on the net estate, after subtracting liens, final expenses, and charitable bequests. It is often advisable to file a 706 even when not legally required in order to formally establish values of assets passed on to heirs, as well as to start the statute of limitations running for any possible challenge by IRS.

It used to be that IRS wouldn’t revise the estate tax return form (706) for several years at a time. Now, with the almost yearly changes in the exemption amounts, IRS has been issuing new revisions of the form for each year. The 2002 form was released in August, 2002.

The normal due date for the 706 is nine months after the person passed away. For those who died in January, that nine months is almost here, and the 2003 version of the 706 has yet to be released. According to the official IRS schedule of releases dates, the 2003 706 is supposed to be available October 7, 2003. My experience with these schedules is that they are as reliable as an appointment with Bill Clinton, who is never on time to a meeting.

A draft of the 2003 706 was posted by IRS back in July.

There are often times when closing up an estate, including the filing of all tax returns, is a rush priority. If you can’t wait for the official release of the new form (IRS is notorious for missing these scheduled release dates) and need to close up an estate ASAP, you can go ahead and use the 2002 version. You just need to manually make any changes that would affect the tax calculations between years. I have had to do that on a number of occasions, and IRS has never had a problem with it.

If the nine months are up before the new form is released, or if you just need more time to get everything together, you can also file for a six month extension on Form 4768, sending in a payment for any expected tax.