IRS Tax Return Tips and Tricks

Both Turbo Tax and H&R block calculate my return as 2K when the total Federal taxes in 2009 I paid is 1700 only. I live in Florida where there are no state taxes. I guess the error is occurring as I am a US resident alien(not a citizen) for tax purposes and I worked in my country of citizenship(from Jan to Aug 2009) where I earned around 6K and earned around 15K from Sep 2009 to Dec 2009 in US. I am a US resident alien by the substantial presence test. The 6K earned income in foreign country is coming as negative which is reducing my taxable income from 15K to 15-6 = 9K. I entered all the information properly, but still the error persists in both applications.

1. Am I understanding correctly that both applications are determining my refund inaccurately? I gather 6K should be added and then excluded from the foreign income exclusion which is 91400 for 2009.

Since my situation is complicated enough that both applications are computing the refund incorrectly,

2. Should I file for an extension or go to an actual tax preparer(which is difficult as no preparer would have time now)?

3. How do I choose a proper tax preparer as my case involves foreign income and investments so is a bit complex?

Any advice would be appreciated.
I am using the Free versions of both software. Could that be an issue?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 at 11:33 am and is filed under Tax Return Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.