Intuit Financial Community: taxdetective - Viewing Profile

Easter1, on 12 March 2012 - 10:37 AM, said:

Easter, IPBC doesn't encourage it's members to hang out their shingles for tax preparation and in fact doesn't encourage such action. I doubt their liability insurance coverage would be valid but I don't know that.

What I wonder is where does tax preparation or compliance as I call it start? For CGA BC, that line is crossed when you prepare GST/HST returns or Payroll remittances, not just T1's, T2's, but slips, and remittances.

My participation has been to encourage bookkeepers and accountants who don't know tax (the majority) to connect with accountants who do tax, to engage them when that line gets crossed, and to help them recognize where the line is and even that there is a line and they should look for it.

My challenge is finding accountants to refer them to, and I'm especially looking for accountants who don't call them names like button pusher. Over the 26 + years I've been engaged in this business, I would consider that most of the people I've hired were as smart or smarter than me, many had university degrees in other subjects and found the work very interesting. I needed them to be my eyes and ears on every single transaction and that meant they had to understand that tax consequences were everywhere and in the here and now, not just at the end of the year when preparing the tax return. GST/HST and payroll and WCB, those are every day occurrences, not an annual event. They hadn't studied accounting. They are anything but button pushers, engaging in high level constructs without great difficulty when presented with the concepts, in small doses of course.

And don't think that because someone these days has taken the advanced tax course that they've even cracked the ITA. Last night at a student recruitment event for CGA BC I was asking University students who had completed advanced corporate tax courses what they thought of the ITA and they all admitted they had not read the ITA, they hadn't even opened it, and had no idea when I mentioned S. 69 or 85 or 87 or 88 what I was talking about.

My advice to them when they wanted to know how to get a job that wasn't just filing? Read the ACTs (ITA and ETA) first, then the CCH Preparing your Income Taxes book, and after that every single IT Bulletin, and GST/HST memo/memoranda. What else should I add to that list? Then create cases for yourself on the tax software out there that's free, or get the free Profile download for a month and play during spring break. They looked shocked that they still had more to learn and asked how much reading I do. Oh yes, and start watching tax cases in the tax courses, et al, they're free on www.canlii.org

Old_number_17, on 10 March 2012 - 05:10 PM, said:

Burt...not touchy, just pensive... and concerned about what I'm doing being misunderstood, but that's always a given, so I've expounded off forum.
http://taxdetective....nsible-and.html

Easter1, on 09 March 2012 - 08:05 PM, said:

I am curious why you would want to discuss what I do in a software forum.

You could always attend the course to find out if you are that curious.

Ragnar Danneskjöld, on 09 March 2012 - 04:35 AM, said:

Hi, I wasn't thinking real estate commission in the usual sense, but there could be a realtor whose professional expertise was utilized to draw up documents or process the sale plus appraisal fees, or a realtor might review the paperwork for the sale because of environmental, permit or zoning issues, or there could be legal fees for preparing the paperwork for the sale. I guess since you are both sides of the deal, you could fobb all of that over to the purchaser and that would make it easier for the S. 85 rollover to be clean.

Property purchase tax in BC is 1% on first $200,000 and remainder at 2%... and since that's a purchase tax, that would be on the purchaser's side.

Whew! one less thing to worry about. I'll add those costs on the corporate side. Thanks!

Jim, on 08 March 2012 - 02:04 PM, said:

No, I didn't enter them in Schedule 3 Details as I entered them on the T776 schedules as this was a rental property. As long as proceeds exceeded cost, there was a flow through to S. 3.

The minute that proceeds equalled cost, they disappeared off S. 3. I was aware that there was not a capital loss on depreciable property and that it's a single class over $50,000 and there was recapture of CCA taken, it was just that the line on S. 3 disappears when it's nil.

I then wanted to claim the same for land, and used Class 90 as it was the land associated with the rental property, again fine as long as there was a positive balance, but nil, nothing, and negative, nothing.

I guess the only way to deal with reporting on S. 3 would be to duplicate the numbers on the S. 3 Details report in order to show the disposition. It was more about showing the disposition (I'm pro-forma'ing a S.85 rollover next week for IPBC during the bookkeeping for transitions workshop and wanted to show how the reporting for tax on the T1 worked.

The problem seems to be the formula cutting off the ability to record a nul entry. And I guess my workaround is to enter on S. 3 Details.

Just curious, administratively, how would you handle selling costs after the fact? I'm talking property purchase taxes and legal bills / commissions for realtors.

When there are selling costs and there's been a S. 85 and the election was cost, when selling costs show up would you adjust your cost and your proceeds to offset the increase in ACB of land and building and adjust the S. 85 election or ??? It's rather circular as you don't know the costs until after if the legal bills aren't presented immediately.