Discussion Forum - Consumer Questions

From TaxAlmanac

About TaxAlmanac

This website is TaxAlmanac, a free online tax research resource and community for tax professionals. It was developed by Intuit, the makers of the professional tax preparation products Lacerte and ProSeries – software packages that professional tax preparers use for providing services to their clients.

Participation in the tax and accounting discussion forums on TaxAlmanac is limited to tax or accounting professionals only. Questions asked by those perceived not to be professional preparers are subject to being deleted or moved to the Consumer Forum.

The professionals who use TaxAlmanac to interact with their fellow professionals will occasionally reply to the questions in the Consumer Forum with a suggestion or comment, but that is not the primary intent of this site. If you have a question which your local paid tax professional hasn't answered sufficiently, we recommend the following resources:

Tax Resources for Consumers

1. The IRS has some excellent resources that are available to you at www.irs.gov:

• Publication 17: IRS Pub 17 - you’ll be amazed how many questions can be answered with this publication
• More publications: IRS publications
• General information for individuals: IRS info – note the search tool at the top!
• Information about your refund and stimulus rebates (2008)/credits (2007).

2. TurboTax has a variety of advice sites:

• Support main page: TurboTax Support
• Hints and tips: TurboTax Blog
• Ask a tax question/search previously asked questions: TurboTax Community

3. Other site(s):

• State tax info: State map
• Find free tax prep locations by state/county/city, from University of Missouri: Find VITA, TCE or AARP sites

Also, you are welcome to use TaxAlmanac's yellow search button (to the left of the screen) to find information about issues you are facing.

However, nothing on this website is a substitute for actual tax research leading to a thorough, complete, accurate answer to a specific tax question – one of the many value-added services that can be provided by your own tax adviser. To properly provide actionable advice and follow-up, your tax professional will need to be apprised of your entire business and individual tax situation, and will ask a variety of questions to be sure that you take the best possible actions both for the short-term and the long-term. Obviously, use of TaxAlmanac is not in any way a reasonable substitute for this kind of business relationship.

To find out more about choosing a tax advisor, and for a variety of links that allow you to search for a tax advisor by location, specialty, and/or designation, please refer to Finding a local tax preparer.

Consumer Forum

If you keep scrolling down, you will be able to review prior questions that were moved out of the tax and accounting forums under the TaxAlmanac guidelines (i.e., the tax and accounting forums are intended for use by tax and accounting professionals only).