Well-organized records make it easier to prepare a tax return and help provide answers if your return is selected for examination or if you receive an IRS notice. You must keep records, such as receipts, canceled checks, and other documents supporting an item of income, a deduction, a credit appearing on a return, etc. Here are the list of a handful of tips. 1. Go paperless with online bank account statements - perhaps even copies of cancelled checks and deposit records 2.

Tax refunds can feel like Christmas in springtime. With a sudden boost to your bank account, you can look forward to going on a shopping spree, catching up on debt or squirreling the refund away in savings. These days, you can even anticipate when your windfall will arrive by tracking the status of your refund with the Refund Status tool available from the IRS online. For those receiving minimal refunds, the celebration can be less like real bubbly and more like club soda. B

The Electoral College has confirmed new president-elect making great changes next year. For now, we still need to keep track of the routine things involved in bookkeeping and tax. Here are some quick steps: 1. Make charitable contributions before year-end This is an exceptional way to reduce your tax burden for the year as well. Remember to look up the charity to see what they do with your donations. Also, the IRS imposes several rules for claiming a deduction for donation:

If people haven’t filed their tax returns for a number of years, they are likely anxious and find themselves glancing over shoulder periodically to see if Uncle Sam has caught up with them. Once a refund is older than three years, they can no longer be claimed and can’t be applied to other year income tax liabilities. Thus, non-filers may have the IRS jumping on them about filing or they might be missing records. They may also end of owing quite a bit to the IRS by complement

Taxes are a necessary evil - the price we pay for roads, bridges, schools and law enforcement. Audits, on the other hand, feel just plain evil. In an effort to thwart fraud, the Internal Revenue Service audits about one percent of U.S. taxpayers every year. IRS computers are programmed to catch outliers and oddities on returns; any item that falls outside the norm may be flagged so that an IRS employee can review it to see if there's actually a need for an audit. Common red

There are a range of reasons to keep records. In addition to tax purposes, people may need to keep them for insurance purposes or for getting a loan. Good records is useful to: Identify sources of income. People may receive money or property from a variety of sources. Records help them determine the sources of income needed to separate business from non- business income and taxable from nontaxable income. Keep track of expenses. This will help taxpayers identify expenses