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Friday, April 5, 2019

Filing Our Income Tax

Aloha Everyone,

One of the urgent things to take care of was filing of our 2018 income tax return. Since our retirement, J.J. has been filing our joint return using Turbo Tax. This year, due to the new tax laws, he decided to use a professional tax preparation service.

The tax preparer was friendly, outgoing and had years of experience in the field. We decided to go with her. The firm is a very large, well-established American tax preparation company with over 1,000 branches.

The preparer made errors inputting wrong amounts which could have costed us 3 times more in taxes. She also made an error on J.J.’s name by using his middle name as his last. Fortunately, we caught them on time before the IRS accepted our electronic filing.

J.J. stated that the 2018 filing was not as complicated as it was originally announced. He will go back to filing our own tax returns next year. In the meantime, the tax preparer has sent us a survey asking us to rate her work and would we recommend friends?  No thank you. Our position is not to write anything bad about the firm or her service, but we also will not go back to them.

Anyway the bottom line is that thank goodness our federal taxes are done. As South Dakotans, we pay no state income tax.

Aloha -- Cathi