ALERTS 

New York State will send you an e-mail regarding your tax refund, notices and other correspondence

You can now sign up for email notifications from the New York State Tax Department. NYS is encouraging taxpayers to sign up to get email notifications from them. For example, They will send you an email when your income tax refund is on its way. You can also use email to get: - bills and related notices - statement of interest income for your federal tax purposes - other notifications concerning your tax account To learn more: - sign into your online service account and select "Manage Email" from the "Account Preferences" tab - click on the email alerts link to see what notices are currently available through email - you can also go to the Online Services page of our web site to view videos and demos. The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance will never contact you by email to ask you to validate personal information such as your username, password, or account numbers. If you have questions, please visit their Web site: http://www.tax.ny.gov

Ready or Not - Here are the Major 2013 Tax Changes

1. If your taxable income exceeds $400,000 ($450,000 married) all earnings above that rate will be taxed at 39.6% rather than the current rate of 35%.

2. More important is the phase-out of itemized deductions for individuals with Adjusted Gross income over $250,000. For every dollar of income over that amount, then the total of itemized deductions for taxes, interest, charitable contributions and miscellaneous investment and employment expenses will be reduced by 3% (subject to a maximum reduction of 80%). So if your AGI is $500,000, then you would lose up to $7,500 of itemized deductions which would effectively increase the marginal rate from 39.6% up to approximately 42.5%. However, if you are in the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax), the tax benefits from deducting all but mortgage interest and charitable contribututions have been marginalized. The likelihood is that New York State will use the Federal itemized deductions as a starting point which will effectively also increase the State (and NYC) income tax payable.

3. There is a phase-out of personal exemptions but this will not adversely affect taxpayers in the AMT.

4. Long Term Capital gains and Qualified Dividends had been taxed at the favorable 15% rate. The rate is now increasing to 20% for those taxpayers in the $400,000 + bracket. Add to this the 3.8% surtax on investment income and the highest rate becomes 23.8%.

5. The 2% break on social security withholdings for employees and self-employed individuals has been eliminated so this will mean a maximum additional tax cost of $2,274 for those earning the maximum subject to social security of $113,700.

We will update this Alert as soon as additional information is received so please check back with us.