[GNC] How to treat benefit payments from government?

Michael or Penny Novack stepbystepfarm at comcast.net
Thu Apr 18 09:23:27 EDT 2019


On 4/17/2019 6:16 PM, Adrien Monteleone wrote:
> Someone on the list from Canada (even better, a local CPA) should offer better advice, but the first question you probably want answered is, “Is this taxable next year?”
>
> That will likely influence how you record it now.
>
> Regards,
> Adrien
Adrian, it could be worse than that (in the general case). How about SS 
pension payments here in the US? The question "is this taxable" cannot 
be answered based upon the pension payment alone because it will depend 
on OTHER income received. Thus while you could possibly "know" (barring 
unexpected events) that none of it will be taxable (your estimate of 
other income is below X) or that 85% of it will be taxable (your 
estimate of other income is above Y) what you enter COULD be wrong << in 
the former case you ended up receiving some windfall and in the latter, 
suffered some economic disaster >> But SOME of us, alas, normally have 
an "other" income between X and Y and always have a messy calculation to 
perform come tax time to figure out how much of our SS was taxable.

Michael D Novack


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