Don’t Overlook Line 45

Do you have to pay the alternative minimum tax?

“There’s no one thing that one can say for sure ‘this is going to be an AMT problem,'” said Mark Luscombe, a principal analyst with CCH, a tax-research, publishing and software firm in Riverwoods, Ill.
That means some are likely shocked to find they’re in the AMT, a parallel tax system created in the late 1960s to target a handful of wealthy Americans who had managed to avoid paying income tax.
“You don’t even have to be making a lot of money to fall into the alt-min anymore. It’s not about the big-income guy anymore,” said Barbara Steinmetz, a certified financial planner and enrolled agent in Burlingame, Calif.
“Property taxes help boost you there. State income taxes help boost you there,” she said, noting that one client who formerly self-filed came to her for help with a $30,000 bill for unpaid AMT.

Posted by on March 2nd, 2006 at 10:26 am


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