MY FIRST LIVE WEBINAR

I just completed my first National Association of Tax Professionals (NATP) live webinar – which was my first live webinar of any kind from any source.  I prefer, and in the past have always received, my continuing professional education from live seminars (or personal reading).  The title of the webinar was “Reporting PTPs (Publicly Traded Partnerships)”.

 

As background, I hate investment limited partnerships and their corresponding K-1s.  As I mentioned in Monday’s post here at TTP, in my opinion the biggest PITA related to the preparation of 1040s today, the item that provides tax preparers with the most agita and aggravation, is the Form K-1 from a limited partnership investment.  This is mainly because of the items included in “Other Income” and “Other Deductions” that are identified in the supplemental statements and schedules, many involving obscure Tax Code section references. And because they always arrive months late.

 

To repeat what I said Monday, I firmly believe –

 

* brokers earn an increased or enhanced commission for selling these GDMF things,

 

* there are many mutual funds available that offer similar, or better, investment returns and benefits than these GDMF things, and

 

* in many cases any earnings and tax benefits from these GDMF things are wiped out by the additional costs involved with 1040 preparation.

 

I no longer accept any new clients, but if I did I would refuse to accept any who had these investments.  Thankfully I have gotten all but one my existing clients who had these K-1s to totally divest themselves of them.  Unfortunately, the one remaining client is the only client that I cannot tell “good-bye”, so I am forced to deal with the GDMF things.

 

I posted about this on the Facebook group for the NJ chapter of NATP, stating that I wished NATP would offer a workshop to explain in detail the obscure “Other Income” and “Other Deduction” items, with an emphasis on how to report these numbers on the 1040.  I was told on the group that NATP was offering the webinar on PTPs that I just completed.

 

My problems with K-1s is not limited to those issued by PTPs, but most PTP K-1s have these pesky “Other Income” and “Other Deduction” items.  So I had hoped that this webinar would provide some help.

 

While I have no complaints with the webinar as an education offering – the instructor was informed and clear in her presentation and the information provided was not unimportant – for my purpose it was a total waste of time and money.  In the 2 hours (actually 100 minutes) it did not discuss any of the “Other Income” or “Other Expense” items that cause all the problems and agita.  It was more a basic overview of PTP K-1s and introductory in nature.

 

As a procedural comment – while I guess the frequent “Check for Understanding” polls may be necessary for NATP to judge if a real person is actually listening, these breaks were, for me, a total waste of time, taking away 10+ minutes of the 100 minute total time allotment from actual education.

 

This points up one of my complaints about NATP Conference and Forum sessions – 2 hours is often totally inadequate to properly cover a topic.  To correctly deal with PTPs, or limited partnership investments in general – at least 4 hours are required – with most of the first half on the basics and a full 2 hours (again unfortunately only 100 minutes) or more on the “special issues” of these K-1s.  I think a half day of this topic should be included in a future “Beyond the 1040” workshop (offered by NATP at year-end in conjunction with the annual year-end update class).

 

What the webinar did was reinforce my belief that this type of investment is more agita for the preparer and more costly to the client than it is worth and should be avoided like the plague.  These investments are most definitely NOT for middle-class and upper middle-class casual investors.  My advice to fellow tax pros, whether new to the business or more experienced, is, unless you want to specialize in this area, to “just say no” to clients with these K-1s.

 

With the extreme complexity of K-1 issues, the talk of doing away with all industry-specific business tax loopholes that is part of the cocktail-napkin scribblings known as the “framework” for tax reform is most important.  I want Congress to do away with ALL the weird specialized items of “other” income and deductions and have the K-1s report ONE line item – Box 1 - that reflects ALL non-rental business income or loss.

 

As far as this new-to-me venue is concerned, I would sign up for another live, or taped, online webinar in the future, if I was assured the topic would be relevant or helpful to me.  But I still prefer live workshops.

 

If any of youse guys out there know of a CPE offering that actually deals with the specifics of the obscure “Other Income” and “Other Deduction” items please let me know.

 

TAFN