one-time offer Who Has to File the Form 6251?
A common demand that is asked is who has to file the Irs Form 6251, "Alternative Minimum Tax - Individuals." The sass seemingly is easy - those who have to file the Form 6251 are those who owe the Alternative Minimum Tax. If a taxpayer does not owe the Amt, the 6251 does not need to be attached to the Form 1040. But how does a taxpayer know if he owes the Amt? There are several dissimilar ways to arrival this; these are discussed below.
Who Has to File the Form 6251?
1. Fill out the Form 6251
Each and every taxpayer is responsible to rule the taxes he owes, so he alone is responsible to test for the Amt. Filling out the form is one sure way to do this; if the Amt is not owed, the form naturally can be discarded. But with the Irs estimating that it takes 21.4 hours on midpoint to faultless the Form 1040, together with article keeping and other requirements, why add to this burden if there is any way around it?
2. Fill out the worksheet placed in the Form 1040 instructions
The Irs has plentifulness of instructions. The 2009 version of the basic Form 1040 instructions is 175 pages long, and buried in among all that good knowledge is a worksheet to help taxpayers rule of they owe the Amt (for 2009 it is placed on p. 41). But this worksheet is of tiny aid because it focuses only on the basic computation, and whether a taxpayer's itemized deductions or the phaseout of the Amt exemption is what is triggering the Amt.
What the worksheet does not do is help a taxpayer who has any of the 17 Amt items and toll that are listed there. If a taxpayer has any one of these, he is told to "fill in Form 6251 instead of the worksheet."
3. Go to the Irs web site and check out its "Amt Assistant."
This is a handy tiny tool, but again is of tiny utility because it naturally is an electronic version of the worksheet found in the Form 1040 instructions. If a taxpayer has none of the 17 items, this can save him from having to do the actual calculations himself. But if the taxpayer has any one of the items, it's back to the Form 6251.
4. If I didn't pay it last year then I don't owe it this year (also known as the "head in the sand" approach)
It's probably fair to say that it is not anyone's idea of fun to fill out Irs forms, especially if it is not vital to do so. So one arrival is that, if the taxpayer did not owe the Amt last year, and assuming no big changes in income or deductions this year, the odds are that the Amt won't be due again this year. But for some taxpayers it doesn't take much of a fluctuation in income or deductions to get caught in the Amt. Other problem is that this arrival fails miserably if Congress does not once again increase the "patch," the each year indexing of the Amt exemption whole for inflation. If the patch is not acted on again this year, the whole of individuals owing the Amt will growth from the current 4.4 million to a projected 26.7 million. As of today's date, the patch has not been enacted for 2010, which means that 22.3 million taxpayers cannot rely on the test of not having paid the tax in the prior year.
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