Skip to footer

Tax season is open for 2016: 10 changes and five weird deductions

The 2016 tax season officially started Jan. 19 - the first day the Internal Revenue Service began accepting individual electronic tax forms. With that in mind, here are the newest changes the IRS has implemented - along with some of the more surprising deductions you can claim.

4. Not having health insurance will cost you. More.

Jonathan Bachman/Reuters/File
The federal government forms for applying for health coverage are seen at a rally held by supporters of the Affordable Care Act, widely referred to as "Obamacare", outside the Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center in Jackson, Mississippi (October 4, 2013).

Under Obamacare guidelines, individuals are required to pay a fine for any month they, their spouses, or tax dependents don’t have health insurance that meets the minimum coverage requirements.

The penalty amount is calculated as either a percentage of household income or individually -- whichever is higher -- and has jumped from $285 per person in 2014 to $2,085 per person in 2016.

For some people, even the lowest cost Bronze level health insurance plan available in the federal health insurance marketplace may still be unaffordable. The government allows those people for whom a health insurance plan would cost more than 8.05 percent of their household income to apply for an exemption.

However, “[t]here are no liens, levies, or criminal penalties for failing to pay the fee,” according to the health insurance Marketplace. The IRS will simply hold back the amount of the fine from any future tax refunds. 

4 of 14
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.