Blog Archives
-
Taxing Internet Sales is Wrong and Doesn't Help Main Street
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Sunday April 28, 2013From the Bleeding Edge blog . The U.S. Senate has passed a law to allow states to steal even more money out of your pocket by forcing web sites to charge you a sales tax, no matter where you live. Truth is, it was bound to happen. Remember, taxes are not what you pay for services from the state, as the original stated intent was. Today, they are just a way for a bloated and ineffective state or federal government to steal money from working Americans to give to the people who will vote to keep them in office. And so we get taxes on Internet sales. Yes, this will kill many small businesses that cannot afford to keep track of the tax filings for some 4,800 US taxing authorities. No, they cannot explain why web sites selling widgets... -
Licensing Tax Preparers: It's necessary, and it's going to happen soon
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Friday April 12, 2013From the "Bleeding Edge" blog : More than half of all tax returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service are prepared by professionals. That’s a substantial number of returns, so it is sad to see the number of preparers who make significant errors. And the number of software products for tax preparation that run into substantial problems by calculating taxes incorrectly. No need to name them – you can read the headlines for yourselves. The point is that the IRS wants to clean up this mess by licensing tax preparers, and I am all for it. The sad truth is that while many people can do their own taxes by self-directed online tax programs, the code is getting so complicated that half or more of the population and nearly all... -
Accounting's Disability Niche
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Friday April 12, 2013From the Bleeding Edge blog. Tax and Accounting services are and always have been niche businesses. That is to say, firms become successful by identifying segments of their market that have accounting and tax needs, then serving that segment well. Which is why I’m surprised that more firms are not building their client base by serving the growing ranks of disabled Americans. By all accounts, there are some 8.8 million people in the United States today, and the numbers are increasing. In the year from November, 2011 to November, 2012, an additional 1.2 million Americans joined the ranks of the disabled. There are a host of reasons for this increase, but four factors are likely contributors: The Veteran’s Administration and... -
Is Facebook Becoming Obsolete?
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Tuesday March 19, 2013
From Dave's Bleeding Edge blog : Last year, I began warning that Facebook was a tech crash in the making. It wasn’t just that the social network had no other business model than mining its own users for their personal data to sell to advertisers. It wasn’t that the service was over-run by sleazy advertisers, viruses and hucksters. It was because its core users, the tween-to-twentysomething group, is notoriously fickle. One day you are hotter than the teenie rock group Hanson, the next day you are embarrassing to be seen with. Not only that, young people appear to be turned off by the raw egotism of the service. But that’s not the disconcerting part of all of this. The truly disconcerting part is that the company, now ten... -
Cutting your Internet Bill, Part III
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Monday March 18, 2013So you have done your homework, cut your bills for some things, but are you really done squeezing the fat out of your communications bills? Not even close. For one thing, if you have been very lucky you may have cut your bill by about $100, but you are still on the hook to a variety of vendors for upwards of $250 per month. You can do better, and here’s how. This is part III of a three-part series from Dave's Bleeding Edge Blog . You can read the first two here and here . Note that since we gave the first five in the previous article, we will start with #6: 6) Cut your cable/satellite/fiber TV bill by cutting out channels. For the package that you buy, to get the channels you like to watch, you will pay from $100 to $150... -
Tax season scams that tax preparers need to worry about
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Tuesday March 12, 2013From Dave McClure's Bleeding Edge blog . The last thing you need in the middle of tax season is to be hit by scammers trying to plant malware on your computer and force you to make payments to them. The Internet Crime Complaint Center ( http://www.ic3.gov ), a joint effort of the National White Collar Crime Center and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is currently warning about two scams, the Citadel Malware Extortion Scam and the Tech Support Scam. Here are the reports, taken from the IC3 web site: Citadel Malware Extortion A new extortion technique is being deployed by cyber-criminals using the Citadel malware platform to deliver Reveton ransomware. The latest version of the ransomware uses the name of the Internet Crime... -
Cutting Your Internet Bill, Part II
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Sunday March 10, 2013If you are looking to cut the costs of your telecommunications systems, understand up front that you will be lied to, lied about, mislead and confused. The companies that provide these services have absolutely no interest in giving you real and usable facts with which to make valid decisions. (This is Part II of a three-part series from Dave's ' Bleeding Edge ' blog. Click here to see Part I .) You will be treated as though you are moderately stupid, or simply handed off by a customer service representative who has no power to help you in the least. Nor is the government in your corner – except in the case of cell phones. But if you are willing to do a little work and introspection, here are some steps you may take. If you... -
CPA Select for TurboTax is also good for CPAs
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Tuesday February 12, 2013From the Bleeding Edge blog . In 1990, I was leading a blissful existence as the chief technical writer for an ad agency out of Cleveland when I was recruited out to join an accounting software firm. I went from work on the space shuttle to working Superfund environmental sites and writing technical articles to be part of a turn-around management team for a flailing company that was a tiny little division of what is now Thomson Reuters. It was an interesting assignment, working for CPAids. Because it was a really good software company, and because it was virtually impossible to market products in 1990 that had “aids” in their name. But it was a great learning experience, and one that led after I left the company to an offer to... -
Jailbreaking a Smartphone is Now Illegal
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Monday February 4, 2013From the Bleeding Edge blog . Very quietly, the Librarian of Congress has let slip into law a little-known provision that makes it illegal to “jail-break” your smartphone. The provision, based on an interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), imposes fines of up to $500,000, jail terms of up to five years, or both. It is still legal to buy “unlocked” phones on the open market and carry them to your carrier for a service plan. What has been happening is that some cell phone providers, in order to entice new customers, have heavily subsidized the costs of the phones themselves. Savvy consumers have been able to buy a phone from one provider, break the contract or terminate early, then take the phone to... -
Time To Disable Java
By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Thursday January 24, 2013From Dave McClure's Bleeding Edge blog. This is late January, that awkward period when tax season looms but is not quite here that is very similar to watching the afternoon sky as a snowstorm approaches. And much like the approach of a winter storm, the approach of tax season calls for some last minute preparations to make life easier in the days ahead. In terms of computing technology, this means disabling or removing Java from all of your office computers, both PC and Mac. Java is an interesting and effective programming platform developed by Sun Microsystems and now owned by Oracle. It gained early prominence as a web platform because it could so easily be used for multiple computing platforms (Mac, PC, Unix, etc.) and was...
