Tax Tips
Remember to report Form 1099 information on the line intended for the amount as reported on the Form 1099. Since the IRS will be looking for an entry on a specific line, it should appear there. You can add or subtract the amount of the error elsewhere in the return to correct the situation. Be sure to attach a letter of explanation to the return.

If your high-income client does not qualify for the Hope credit, let the student claim it. The parents can forego claiming the student as a dependent and, assuming the student has taxable income, can shift the credit to the student, who can also benefit by using the dependency deduction. Click here for some other tax tips!

Late with your tax preparation? Use the web!
Go to http://www.filetaxes.com/hereshow.jsp and fill them out online today, print, and submit to the IRS in one fell swoop. The cost is $3.49 per form. While this may seem steep, it is clearly cheaper than producing the forms late. Great for web neophytes!

Tax Tools
There is so much available on the web; sometimes the problem is sorting through all the noise in order to find a signal. Check out the Income Inclusion Calculator for your leased vehicle. Taxpayers can obviously claim a deduction for vehicles leased for business use. But since the vehicle is usually also used for personal purposes, the deduction must be prorated between business (deductible) and personal (non-deductible) use. The deductible amount is reduced further if the vehicle's fair market value exceeds certain levels. Congress established the "Income Inclusion Rules" to attempt to reduce the lease deduction to the same level as depreciation that could be claimed had the vehicle been purchased. The Income Inclusion Calculator is a calculator (utilizing the IRS tables shown in Publication 463 for non-electric vehicles) to compute the amount of "add-back" to be reported on the same schedule the lease deduction is claimed. To try the tool (free to registered users) you must log in at 1040tools.com and select "Other Professional Calculators" from the home page.

Insurance Trust Basics
The whole problem of estate tax consequences for life insurance owned by the decedent may well go away if the death tax is eliminated. But for now, you may want to review the basics of insurance trusts, incidents of ownership, and related fun stuff by reading an in-depth article at: http://1040tools.com/html/instrust.htm.