E 1040: Fill & Download for Free

The law allows you to exclude rental income for less than 15 days. So do nothing.Here's the quote from the IRS @Publication 527 (2014), Residential Rental PropertyUsed as a home but rented less than 15 days. If you use a dwelling unit as a home and you rent it less than 15 days during the year, its primary function is not considered to be rental and it should not be reported on Schedule E (Form 1040). You are not required to report the rental income and rental expenses from this activity. The expenses, including qualified mortgage interest, property taxes, and any qualified casualty loss will be reported as normally allowed on Schedule A (Form 1040). See the Instructions for Schedule A (Form 1040) for more information on deducting these expenses.

This is a quote from Donald Trump, Jr. and I'm sure he's generalizing about all of his dad's filings, not just his personal 1040. Here is a picture that Donald J. Trump Sr. put out awhile ago of him signing returns.You’re not dealing with your average Presidential candidate here. If Trump were to release a few pages of his 1040, that would generate more questions than answers. Most candidates have simple tax returns and it's no big deal to make available ten years worth at a moments notice — not the case with Donald Trump.According to the financial disclosure forms provided to the Federal Election Commission, Trump serves as executive for 515 different organizations that you can see here. I’m not sure how all of these companies are organized, but I would guess many of them are C corporations or foundations. That means the corporation or foundation has it’s own entity level tax return. These corporations will have their own charitable contributions and sources of income from foreign sources etc; the things people want pick apart on his return. And his foreign investments should be of no surprise because Trump has been candid about his building projects in places like Dubai and Scotland and importing manufactured products from China.Many of these organizations could also potentially be partnerships, S corps or LLC’s — pass through entities where income and deductions are reported on a K-1 and show up on schedule E, page 2 of the individual tax return. Capital gains and losses are also listed on Schedule D and I have seen tax returns for individuals with modest trading activity with many pages listing transactions. But it likey will not add up to a 12,000 page return at the individual level.Trump’s tax attorneys have indicated that he is under audit for several years and I believe this because it's a matter of practice to audit individuals year after year with high net worth especially involving high dollar assets that are bought, sold and depreciated. In fact, Trump has stated the IRS has audited him for the past 12 years. See here. I've seen tax filers get audited for as many as six years in a row with a tenth of the income reported by Trump.The media have taken to making the accusation that, even under audit, Trump can still release his tax returns. Maybe, but this would be incredibly foolish. Overnight, you'd have thousands of self appointed auditors looking for anything that even hints at impropriety. Returns under audit do not necessarily encompass everthing in the return. Very specific items are requested and must be answered. Anyone that's experienced an audit can tell you that you provide just the information they request and no more as it can lead to an expanded scope of the examination. And the media would spend as much as it required to investigate any financial dealings they thought would lead to the demise of Trump’s candidacy. For example, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, has pledged to give up to $5 million to veterans groups if Donald J. Trump agrees to release his tax returns before the Oct. 19 presidential debate. And Moishe Mana, a top fundraiser for Clinton, has offered to give $1 million to the charity of Trump’s choice if he makes them public. He joins an unnamed Republican donor working with Clinton ally David Brock who has made a similar offer of $5 million.This isn't to suggest he has something to hide, but it speaks to the complex nature of our tax code especially in dealing with international business. And it speaks to the politically charged bias towards Trump that is not about full and fair disclosure. It's about digging up dirt of any kind to use for political spin. But rumors abound from a statement from Mark Cuban that he's broke to possible revelations of a link to Russia, to challeging his claims of the amount of charitable donations. And what if Trump did have legitimate business dealings with a Russian company outside of sanction restrictions? We would see never ending stories about how links were found between the Russian government and Trump and how this strongly suggests they hacked the DNC servers to get Trump elected. If thst weren't enough, the IRS commissioner himself is facing impeachment proceedings for targeting conservative organizations for extra scrutiny by IRS examination and denial of tax exempt status.Until the left wing media start fairly criticizing Hillary Clinton’s returns, I don't think Trump has any moral obligation to release his tax returns. The Clintons have received a quarter of a billion dollars in speaking fees over the last 12 years even while she was Secretary of State. And the Clinton Foundation has received nearly 1 billion (3 billion in total since its creation) in donations around the same time frame. Many of these donations are from undisclosed donors because the Foundation has them write checks to their Canadian subsidiary foundation as their laws do not require revealing the source. And we know that over half of the people granted meetings with Clinton as Secretary of State were also donors to the Clinton foundation - a clear suggestion of a pay-to-play quid pro quo arrangement.What did Clinton promise and what will she continue to promise if elected President? In one case, she gave away 20% of America’s strategic supply of uranium to a Russian company with links to their government. In another, Clinton stopped the investigation of the IRS into Swiss account holders with UBS bank. The IRS won a court battle against UBS in an effort to crack down on US residents hiding money off shore. UBS ignored the court order involving 52,000 account holders upon which the IRS planned to revoke its authorization to do business with US citizens, a death blow to any bank. UBS then made a plea to Secretary Clinton as well as large cash donations to her foundation and several million dollar speaking arrangements for Bill Clinton. The result was that UBS had to only release information on 4,450 account holders, a fraction of the original court order. See here.Of course, the Clintons are much more generous than Trump anyway when it comes to charitable giving — or so the media would have us believe. Almost all of the charitable donations the Clintons made in 2014 went to themselves via the Clinton Foundation. Also, IRS filings show that the Clinton Foundation spent just 5.7 percent of its massive 2014 budget on charitable grants. The less than $5.2 million spent on charitable grants in 2014 pales in comparison to the $34.8 million the foundation spent on salaries, compensation and employee benefits. And still less than the 7.8 million it spent on travel expenses. The lion’s share — $50.4 million — of the money spent by the Clinton Foundation in 2014 was marked as “other expenses.” Read here.This much bigger story with the Clintons gets nominally reported and anything involving Donald Trump is scrutinized in a very exaggerated and partisan political way. While this continues to be the case, I think Trump is wise to stay the course as he has no legal nor, as I point out, moral obligation to disclose his returns.

Mike Emeigh and Rick Fritzler make some very good points in their answers. I would just add one more perspective. In college I was required to take classes in Fortran and Basic, so I have a very rudimentary skill at computer programming and can even write a really simple program and was able to teach myself enough html to make some really basic changes to my website. I am an accountant and would equate my programming skills to a computer programmer who works a W2 job and maybe has some interest or dividend income. That computer programmer can probably do his own tax return, just like I can probably insert and re-size an image onto my website.While I fully understand that I am not qualified to write any kind of complex computer software, I find that a lot of computer programmers (along with other non-tax trained individuals in other professions) don't know their limitations in doing their own tax return. For a perfect example of this on Quora read Which retail tax preparation package can handle IRS forms 8833 and 5471?I believe some reasons for this perspective are:The TurboTax Effect that makes average citizens think that simply using the software will make them tax experts. Retail tax software is designed to handle the majority of tax returns that are at their core pretty basic. They are really good at what they do which is simple tax returns. They are sorely inadequate if you have any type of complex tax situation. See my example above and for some perspective - I am not sure my professional tax software that costs thousands of dollars per year, would adequately handle a form 8833 or 5471. It is insane to think a $49.95 retail tax software would, but yet there is obviously someone out there who asked the question.Some people perceive that tax laws are a bunch of hard and fast rules and not open to interpretation and variation as they might apply to similar taxpayers, which is far from the truth. The IRS issued new regulations in 2013 that impact specific types of tax returns for 2014 going forward. I am on an email list of a large group of qualified tax professionals in the Dallas/Ft Worth area, we have known for 10 years that this particular regulation is coming, yet even that group can't agree among themselves how to implement some of the provisions from this one new regulation. I am going to bet that a large number of taxpayers who file their own return with a Schedule E rental property don't even know that the new regulation exists.There are under qualified tax professionals preparing tax returns and I am sure some people have had bad experiences using these "accountants". Maybe even finding out that they knew more than the so called professional. Just to let you in on some inside dirt on my profession, the IRS actually tried a few years ago to implement competency standards for anyone preparing a Form 1040 for compensation and a number of un-licensed tax "professionals" sued and won an injunction to stop the IRS from requiring that you prove your competency in order to prepare someone's tax return for pay. Yes there are bad seeds in this industry.So while I try to answer tax questions as fully as possible, I am often limited to giving general advice and I do end a lot of answers with the suggestion that the OP consult a tax professional. I make that suggestion so that a hopefully qualified tax professional can not only consider all the unique factors that impact the right answer, but also because experience tells me that a little digging reveals that OP's frequently get their facts wrong or don't disclose all their facts and those different facts will very often impact the answer I would have given and I hate giving someone bad advice, but then somewhat like the tax software "garbage in, garbage out".