File a 2010 1040A – No Tax Forms Necessary

Don’t bother with printable forms. Prepare your 2010 return online and still get a refund

On PriorTax you can still file a 2010 tax return and get a refund – no tax forms necessary.

Many late filers are under the mistaken impression that just because some of the major tax companies don’t let you prepare a prior year return that you have to slog through the paper forms yourself. That’s not the case.

PriorTax allows you to prepare a past year tax return online. Based on the information you enter into the online tax application, it will automatically determine which version of the U.S. Individual Income Tax Return is best for you – the 1040, 1040A, or 1040EZ. It will then prepare your return as well as any other required forms and schedules.

You can find a copy of the 2010 Form 1040A here, but why bother? Cease your search for printable tax forms and just let PriorTax take care of the hard work for you.

But if you’re not going to use PriorTax (which will do this automatically) you need to figure out if you are even eligible to file a 1040A. Here’s how the different types of returns break down: the 1040EZ is only for people with super simple tax situations, the normal 1040 is for people whose financial lives are more complicated, and the 1040A falls somewhere in between.

In order to file a 1040A you must meet all six of the following requirements:

1) You only had income from the following sources

• wages, salaries, and tips
• interest and ordinary dividends
• capital gains distributions
• taxable scholarship and fellowship grants
• pensions, annuities, and IRAs
• unemployment compensation
• Alaska Permanent Fund dividends
• taxable Social Security or Railroad Retirement Benefits

2) The only adjustments to income you can claim are

• educator expenses
• IRA deduction
• student loan interest deduction
• tuition and fees deduction

3) You do not itemize deductions
4) Your taxable income is less than $100,000
5) The only tax credits you can claim are

• credit for child and dependent care expenses
• credit for the elderly or the disabled
• education credits
• retirement savings contributions credit
• child tax credit
• earned income credit
• additional child tax credit

6) You did not have an alternative minimum tax adjustment on stock you acquired from the exercise of an incentive stock option

Note that you can also use Form 1040A if you received dependent care benefits or if you owe tax from the recapture of an education credit or the alternative minimum tax.

See what I mean by complicated? And this is just the hassle you have to go through to determine if you can even use the form in the first place. Don’t torture yourself. Use PriorTax instead.

Photo via RLHyde on Flickr.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 28th, 2013 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Taxes for Prior Years. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.