Besides my CPA type work, pretty much the only other thing I do, and the only reason I leave my office, is to help out with our local volunteer fire department. After a recent class we took at the local college on arson investigation, Sherry has started bringing her camera along on calls. We’ve set up a mini website with some of the pictures she has taken, including several from last night’s work on a controlled burn up the road from our place. That was a strange experience for us, since we are so used to trying to put fires out and this time, we were trying to burn the place down.

Child tax credit causes 1.35 million return goofs – This exact same problem happened a few years ago, when people forgot whether or not they had received an advance refund check from IRS during the year. I had a few dozen clients where IRS jogged their memory by adjusting their tax returns to account for the fact that they had indeed already received those payments and weren’t entitled to them again with their tax returns. That kind of sloppy bookkeeping was one of the reasons we have been forcing more and more of our clients to enter everything into QuickBooks; so that we can look for those advance refund checks before preparing the tax returns and avoid the embarrassment of having IRS catch this mistake.

Web Site Shows Neighbor Campaign Donations – You can type your zipcode into this site and find out what people in your area have legally donated to the various presidential candidates. The illegal donations and laundered ones, where employers give their workers money to donate, take a little more digging to uncover.

Mental-health tax drive advances – The rulers of the PRC never tire of thinking of new ways to squeeze money out of people and giving them reasons to move to other, less hostile, states. A plan to add a new tax of one percent of gross (not taxable) income over one million dollars to fund mental health is itself bordering on insanity. Of course, it plays directly to the DemonRats’ main constituency, the “hate the rich” crowd; so it could actually have a chance of becoming law if Governor Arnold doesn’t veto it.