taxes

Your Taxes: Personal Income Tax Deadlines in Nine English Speaking Countries

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For those of you international jetsetters preparing your own taxes, it’s wise to keep an eye on the different financial years when you’re preparing your taxes and accounting records.

Screenshot IRS (US) website

I’ve always had a tough time remembering this info when I efile, so I’ve prepared a helpful list of nine English speaking countries (and Taiwan), their fiscal years and tax deadlines for personal filing.

Country Personal Tax Year Personal Taxes Deadline
United States 1 Jan. to 31 Dec. 15 April
United Kingdom 6 April to 5 April 31 October
Australia 1 July to 30 June 31 October
Canada 1 Jan. to 31 Dec. 30 April
New Zealand 1 April to 31 March 7 July
Hong Kong 1 April to 31 March 15 August
Ireland 1 Jan. to 31 Dec. 31 October
South Africa 1 April – 31 March 5 December
Singapore 1 April – 31 March 15 April
Taiwan 1 Jan. to 31 Dec. 31 May

In some countries, the fiscal (tax) year deadline varies. There is also quite a variation in the deadline date, payment methods, even the nomenclature of the ‘personal income tax’. So always do your research thoroughly and consult competent tax and financial authorities before you submit your taxes.

There are stiff penalites for being late with your tax filing or even non-filing. So I cannot stress enough: do your research ahead of time!

If you spot any errors, please contact me and I’ll update this post as a matter of priority. Also, I’d like to link to some competent tax sources online, including the tax authorities, so drop any links and I’ll turn this into a real resource page.

Do you need a seasoned tax attorney? It’s almost tax season!

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Shopping for a tax attorney is almost like shopping for shoes. You have to try on a few pairs before you decide on what looks good and what does not. There are different kinds of tax attorneys. So you really need to do your homework.

tax attorney dot com screenshot

Get Your Taxes Started

First, you must decide on whether you are having your personal taxes prepared, your business taxes prepared, or both. Then, you look around to see who is nice and cordial, and who is not. You also look around to see who the expert is and what you need to have done, so there will not be any mistakes.

A couple of useful keywords come to mind when shopping for an attorney: compassion, empathy and honesty. At taxattorney.com they seem to take these into serious consideration when dealing with you and your tax sensitivities.

Sure, you could go to your nearest tax office and get your taxes prepared there, but why not do your taxes online to save your money on gas, time and energy? It takes time to browse around online, but your searching online will be greatly reduced because you will not be wasting time sitting at stop lights or waiting behind slow drivers because the speed limit is only 35mph on the streets.

Back Taxes Owed

What if you need special tax help, like an IRS tax audit or unpaid taxes from years ago that you are now ready to pay? Shopping online at taxattorney.com can help you find that specialist to help you get over the financial slump, as a local tax shop may not be able to handle a larger issue.

The taxattorney.com website has a very convenient tool called the “Back Taxes Owed” area where you can select the amount of back taxes owed from a drop-down list. After making your monetary selection of the amount of taxes owed, you would then enter your name, phone number, the best time to call, your email address and any comments you might care to put in.

Website Overview: Tax Attorney dot com

I like the fact that taxattorney.com has a wealth of informational links right on its home page. You can easily find what you are looking for without having to click on several pages down just to get to where you want to go.

The main information is easily visible. This website also tells you up front what types of services it offers, it tells you that they give expert legal advice, and finally, that they have a strict price guarantee. At taxattorney.com the price that they quote you is the price that they will charge you.

If you need additional services from a tax attorney, they will only charge you for those additional services quoted. They will not try to sell you anything else such as tax problems related to the IRS or tax debt. They will only charge you what you came there for.

Another great thing I like about this website is that it reveals untrue myths regarding tax issues, such as do you believe that you don’t earn enough to have to pay tax, or do you think that if you need to apply for your tax refund that the IRS will audit your returns? These are just a couple of myths that many people believe, but are not true. Visit the website to see more untrue myths.

One of the special features of taxattorney.com is that they offer assistance from an IRS lawyer. Sometimes we cannot foresee unexpected pitfalls, curve balls and hidden challenges that lie in tax problems, but a very trained and knowledgeable IRS attorney will be familiar with surprising issues and will know how to handle them.

It might be wise to tell your tax attorney everything. That way you will have complete peace of mind knowing that everything will be resolved because you have told them everything and you have chosen the right attorney. Go with taxattorney.com. You may have a great night’s sleep awaiting you.

IRS Fraud: A whole new scam!

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InvestorBlogger doesn’t often write about scams, but this time I received one scam email that was quite surprising, but obviously a fraud to me. In Taiwan, there’s been quite a bit of publicity about scams involving overpaid taxes being returned. So the nature of the scam wasn’t new to me. Still, if you receive an email looking like this. Beware.

It looks innocent enough, but given the fact that I don’t submit US tax returns, and I’m not a US citizen. I don’t even live there, enough reason to just hit ‘delete’.

But for my readers, I decided to investigate a little further. The link to the scam website was obvious enough, though. Also, the tone of the email was just wrong for an official communication. Why would the IRS hide an address in the first place? And why would the IRS use a website that doesn’t even link to the IRS, but is registered as a Swiss domain (*.cc)…. Mmm. Enough warnings yet?

tax refund fraud

I accessed the website through a proxy server to mask my IP address at home. I don’t know about it being a wise move to visit the website at all, though, as many of these websites attempt to load spyware and other nasties on your computer at the same time as defrauding you. So, don’t be tempted to click! I now regret that I did.

refund fake website

The website then asks you to verify your details (a typical scam trick) without inputting details about your tax filing information or even basic information personal information. Lastly, the website asks you to submit your credit card details to retrieve your payments. The IRS only offers two methods for return of taxes (and neither one involves a credit card).

And if you never submitted an email address to the IRS or the form arrives in an email address that you never used, you can simply dump it. So there are a lot of ways that you can determine if the email is a scam, a spam or genuine.

Email is a useful form of communication, but you still need to be ware any requests for sensitive information. If in doubt, visit the website of the purported institution by directly entering the information in your browser window.