Is this worth it to visit a second cpa?
I owe tax this year and decided to go to a tax prep firm to check. I didn’t feel happy about the service despite the guy got 5 star review on google. He was a bit rushed and the number is 9 dollar different than my turbo tax practice. I’m not sure if it’s worth it to go to the second accountant for another check up. I’m disappointing that I paid money but the service was not that good. He might not be wrong but I doubt his answer. For example he said I still need to pay penalty although my tax this year is >110% of what I paid last year. Are the CPAs worth it? For the context I have joint filling. The most complicated part was the few rsu vests and short term capital gains. The only thing that can go wrong is the rsu but he literally just input the same number in the system.
What's the reason he said you still need to pay penalties?
I wouldn’t bother hiring another. You have a simple tax situation and no potential to save for 2018 at this point. Keep in mind the penalty is based on total tax, not on the amount of tax you had to include when filing your prior year return. Chances are your tax person in fact knows how this works because the computer calculates it, the same as turbo tax. You should do quarterly estimated tax payments to ensure that the total amount given to them in advance next year exceeds the total tax this year. The reality is that the effective tax rates went up for a lot of people like us last year while our withholdings declined causing us to have to pay more at the end, including penalties in some cases. My guess is the IRS will have to be lenient on the penalties this year since they were not sophisticated enough to know how to properly adjust withholdings given the poorly devised tax changes.
Some places will check your tax for free and only charge you if they need to change something. It’s very possible CPA 1 was right. As you know, tax law changed bigly this year and has left a bunch of people shell-shocked.
What are the places that can help me check my tax for free and only charge if they can reduce my owned amount? I can file my tax but don’t want to keep paying if there nothing is changed
Yes. I ended up saving 10k once because of an egregious error. (Early 2000s). Unless you’re self employed or living off large sums of wealth use TurboTax. It’s just as solid as a cpa for most tax returns.
Talk about a confusing answer. So should he just use TurboTax or visit a second CPA?
Visit TurboTax.