Please ensure Javascript is enabled for purposes of website accessibility

Here’s Your Open Thread For the Horrible, No Good October 15 Filing Deadline of 2019

Happy Oct. 15, tax preparers. We hope you make it through today without any last-minute complications or wanting to strangle difficult clients. From what we’ve read and seen on Twitter, this year’s Tax Season 2.0 has been much more of an ass-kicker than in previous years as a result of the new tax law.

And the complaints aren’t just limited to Twitter. Darren Neuschwander, a managing member of Green, Neuschwander & Manning in Robertsdale, AL, told the Wall Street Journal recently that the firm was WAYYY behind on finishing returns before today’s deadline:

Tax preparers are racing to complete individual tax returns due Oct. 15, which will finish tax year 2018 for the more than 15 million people who sought extensions from the mid-April deadline. A late flood of information from investment funds and tough judgment calls about new pieces of the law have accountants bracing for messy days ahead.

“We’re extremely behind,” said Darren Neuschwander, a managing member of Green, Neuschwander & Manning LLC in Robertsdale, Ala., who is preparing some returns himself instead of just reviewing others’ work as he usually does. “All of this is just kind of snowballing on top of everything else.”

Normally, Mr. Neuschwander said, his firm finishes final returns by Oct. 4 so clients can review them.

“That is not going to happen this year,” he said last week, contemplating a queue of 200 returns that has since been whittled down to 118. “It is just not going to happen.”

Things aren’t any rosier in an article Bloomberg published last week about the Oct. 15 deadline and the shit-show that is the revamped tax code:

A change in how the IRS calculates and taxes corporate offshore income has been a challenge for tax preparers, as has a new 20% deduction for pass-through businesses that meet a long list of requirements, accountants said.

Ed Reitmeyer, the Mid-Atlantic regional partner-in-charge at accounting firm Marcum LLP, said he emailed his staff in late July and September to warn that their workload will increase by about 20% in what is already a relatively busy season to meet the Oct. 15 deadline.

“There is some significant overtime,” he said.

Accountants have a new problem this year because they don’t know how to compute key portions of the code. The IRS still hasn’t written implementing regulations for some provisions, and some mistakes that Congress wrote into the law haven’t yet been corrected.

“It’s as or more complex as it was before,” said Mathew Talcoff, a partner in Boston at accounting firm RSM. “We thought we were simplifying things.”

So, congrats on (almost) making it through another tax season. If you need to get something off your chest today, best to let it out here because January is right around the corner.

And remember, if you need a little zen, we’re here for you.

Latest Accounting Jobs--Apply Now:

Have something to add to this story? Give us a shout by email, Twitter, or text/call the tipline at 202-505-8885. As always, all tips are anonymous.

Related articles

The 2022 Bloomberg Tax Author Awards Celebrate the Pinnacle of Tax Intelligence

Once again, in what can only be described as an attempt to market its tax platform, Bloomberg has released its annual awards for the Bloomberg Tax Authors of the Year. We’ll just mention the Federal authors of the year here, but there are also three other categories of Bloomberg author awards: State Tax, International Tax, […]

screenshot of Ask an AI Accountant answering a tax question about gambling winnings

GPT-4 Answers Tax Questions, Gets Them Mostly Right

These days there is a lot of yapping about what AI can and can’t do; it CAN answer bar exam questions so well it’s nearly in the 90th percentile of test-takers, it CAN’T search in real time to find up-to-date answers beyond what it’s been trained on so it won’t be getting stuck in a […]