How to Prepare the Papers for a Tax Return
Male: What papers do I need to prepare my tax return?
Art: The papers that a tax payer needs are the ones that I reference in the introduction, those are the basic 1099 forms, interest, dividends, sales of security, mortgages, if you are an owner of a piece of property. Several, or most of the folks, are also wage earners, so you will obviously need your form W2 from your employer or employers, it is important to have all of them there. Now those are really important because the federal government, the Internal Revenue Service does a really good job of matching the copy that the employer sends to individual returns. So if you leave one of them out, it is gonna delay the processing of the tax return. It may hold up a refund. It may cause them to write you and you’ll have to incur some more effort in order to get your return processed. So having all of those basic documents in front of you is very important. If you are an employee, it will also be helpful if you have your last pay stub of the year, December 31 pay stub. The reason that I mention that, there are a number of things that people do at places of employment where there are not boxes on the W2 to include that information. For example, if you are a federal employee, you might be part of the combined campaign for charitable contributions. So you have some portions of your pay deducted, remitted to the charity of your choice, but if you look at your W2 form, there’s no box on there for that. So unless you have the pay stub you might miss that charitable contribution deduction. For those folks who work in places where there are unions, they may do a check off for union dues. There is no box on the W2 form to put that either. So you would miss that deduction for union dues if you didn’t have your last pay stub, and there are many others, those are just illustrations.