Funny story: Last week I attended the IRS Tax Forum and our keynote speaker was Kirsten Wielobob, Deputy Commissioner for Services and Enforcement. In sharing her enthusiasm for various IRS tools and features, she encouraged us to suggest to our clients that they use the “Paycheck Checkup” (then proceeded to joke about how that phrase makes her think of “how much wood could a woodchuck chuck”).

But that’s not the funny part of the story. That part came when she said that she decided to go ahead and try it out herself, in her own tax situation, and the results came back that she was under-withholding by $500 per paycheck!

My main take-away was that the new “tax reform” has made calculating taxable income so complex that even the revised IRS W-4 form isn’t properly estimating taxpayer withholding. And clocking in at 11 pages of instructions… it’s unlikely most taxpayers will bother with it.

So if you have any concerns whatsoever that you might not be having enough taken out of your check to cover federal taxes, especially if you’re participating in the “sharing economy” — which complicates things exponentially — please do yourself and your tax preparer (so they don’t get shot as the tax-time messenger) a favor and give the new IRS Withholding Calculator a try.

And for the record:

New York state wildlife expert Richard Thomas found that a woodchuck could (and does) chuck around 35 cubic feet of dirt in the course of digging a burrow. Thomas reasoned that if a woodchuck could chuck wood, he would chuck an amount equivalent to the weight of the dirt, or 700 pounds. –American Forest Foundation

Source: IRS Withholding Calculator | Internal Revenue Service