I mean if the IRS just made transcripts easily obtainable on a timely basis, that would be something.
Right now a CPA or Enrolled Agent or one of their employees with a signed Power of Attorney can obtain a copy of the taxpayer’s transcript around May 15 or so… a month AFTER the filing deadline.
If that transcript (minus IRA contributions not yet made) was available to ordinary taxpayers by March 1, that could alleviate a lot of inadvertently omitted income errors.
Also, I am of the very strong opinion that the filing deadline needs to be permanently moved to April 30.
They pushed the deadline for businesses to file a lot of the forms from January 31 to February 15, but did not give the individuals & tax preparers the same extension… thereby shortening their preparation window by 15 days when taxes keep getting more complicated and people need more time, not less, to get them completed. Pushing the filing deadline to April 30 keeps the same preparation window.
I think you could even argue that if you’re going to give businesses an extra 15 days then you should also give individuals another 15 days which would push the filing deadline all the way to May 15.
The problem in our particular case is that the slip only became available anywhere well after I filed the tax return. I do my wife’s and son’s tax returns as they are interrelated so it makes sense for one person to do them all. However I was not aware of one of my wife’s investments so did not know to ask about a late slip. That is on me but it was an honest mistake not deliberate tax evasion. I will of course be more careful going forward having been stung!
I get this gem from tax hawk:
Your W-2 might have too much Social Security tax withheld
Please double check these entries:Social Security Wages (Box 3): $#,###
Social Security Tax Withheld (Box 4): $#,###Usually your Social Security tax withheld will be 6.2% of your Social Security wages in Box 3.
If you need to make changes, go back to the Wages (Form W-2) screen.
If this is correct, contact your employer and request that they refund the $1 of excess Social Security tax back to you.
The box 3 is #9.35, so it rounds down to #9.
The box 4 is #3.51, so it rounds up to #4.
Sometimes, I’m happy that the irs deals with dollars & not cents, but this is not one of those times.
Interestingly, 6.2% of Box 3 is one dollar less than what’s in Box 4, but it’s just a case of Round(1/3,2) * 3 <> Round(1/3*3,2)
The importing from pdf is quite suspect. Lots of errors needed correction. It’s just about as much work as manually typing them in.
I’m not sure whether a pdf is involved, but TurboTax had big problems importing my 1099-B from a financial institution. (The institution makes both a pdf version and and Excel version available on its website for me to access; and TurboTax just asks for the account name). Actually both the pdf version and the Excel version are labeled “Brokerage Statement”, which includes 1099-B, 1099-Div and 1099-Int. It did reasonably well with the 1099-Div and 1099-Int, except that I had to do some extra work to identify tax-exempt income by state and US government interest.
If you overpay or underpay your OASDI contribution does the IRS adjust your tax refund to correct it rather than you go through your employer?
Offhand, I’m not sure. They’ll correct my return if I misstate something they already have details about, such as income or tax already paid. When it comes to a social security discrepancy, I’m not sure. @twig93 might know.
At least I overpaid by a dollar, so I’ve got that going for me.
In a year of a job change, credit for overpayment of Social Security was factored into my income tax math. I forget whether I ended up with a net refund or owed that year, but the net effect was a better tax filing outcome for me.
For the past few years, I’ve had to pay (or had a refund reduced) for owing a small amount for underpaid Medicare taxes.
Yes, decent tax software should do this for you.
Other than minor rounding issues, the big one that comes to play is if you earn more than the wage base ($168,600 in 2024, $176,100 in 2025) but that income is split among multiple employers. Each employer is required to withhold 6.2% on your earnings (up to the wage base) with that employer. So you can easily have too much withheld. You do get that back at tax time if you or your tax preparer or your tax software fills out the appropriate form.
Medicare tax can also be either over or under-withheld on married high earners. If you’re single the tax is 1.45% up to $200,000 and then 2.35% above $200,000. And that’s exactly what your employer will withhold. But if you’re married filing jointly the tax is 1.45% up to $250,000 of joint income and then 2.35% above that. But your employer doesn’t know your spouse’s income so they withhold at the single rate. (Or even if they do because your spouse works there too… they still withhold at the single rate.)
So if you earn $210,000 and your spouse earns $30,000 they withhold too much tax by $90, which you DO get back if you fill out the right form. But if you and your spouse BOTH earn $210,000 then in aggregate you had $1,350 too little withheld and you have to pony up at tax time.
Moving jobs mid year if you earn over $200,000 or you & your spouse earn over $250,000 will also result in too little Medicare tax being withheld. Even if you’re both under the wage base.
I am just missing 1 form from Prosper. I am surprised that both Robinhood and Fidelity were actually early.
my Fidelity is online and always early
24yo filed. She owed $1 to the feds - makes a dad proud 
← tear of proudness.
She just got lucky that her deductions matched so well her income tax owed, of course, but, as my boss used to say, “It’s better to be lucky than good.”
FILED!
I wonder what type of person would pay $15.97 for a bound copy to be mailed to them. 
It seems like all of my incomes end with .50, so they get rounded up, & all my withhelds end with .49, so they get rounded down. I need Gus Gorman from SuperMan III to get me all of those half cents.
I will let you in on a secret: on your IRS transcript (the one where they have all of your 1099s and W2s and such) everything is rounded down. And they’re not going to come after you for a $1 discrepancy. They won’t even know it’s wrong.
You could round your income of $X.99 down to $X and your withholdings of $Y.01 up to $Y+1 and it would be fine. Their info is rounded down but they have non-zero tolerances.
I got the brokerage statement last week, so I finished filling in the blanks in the tax software over the weekend.
The only reason I haven’t yet filed is my wife asked the question: “Considering everything that’s gone on in the past few weeks, could we protest by paying in pennies?”
(A bit of online research suggests that it’s technically possible to do, but it may be more annoying for us than it is for the feds. Still considering whether there’s any effective way to be petty…and suspect there isn’t.)
If you look at the tax tables you can see that all the taxes are in brackets. Once your taxable income goes over $3,000 the income steps go to $ 50. Even just over $0 there are $5 increments. Twig is correct, pennies are strictly under the radar.
Publication 17 (2024), Your Federal Income Tax | Internal Revenue Service
Yeah, and even if the rounding put you one $50 bucket lower than where you belong, they literally won’t even know it’s wrong.
Now if you tell them that your taxable income is $95,060 and then input the tax from the $95,000 - $95,050 bucket, they might catch that.
But if you rounded down on 11 different income documents to get to an income of $95,049 when it should really be $95,060 they don’t even have the tools to catch that.