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Originally Posted by mandal
Wow, if you could help me I will praise you. I've even tried going to a tax person, but what they calculated seems wrong. PLEASE and I mean PLEASE help, I've looked everywhere for help, but none was out there, here's the situation:
Over the summer I participated in a Research Experience for Undergraduates program funded by the NSF. I hope you are familiar with this as what happened in terms of payment of this program was unique. I basically did research for a university with due dates on papers and such and they paid me in intervals corresponding to due dates. All in all they paid me 3,000 plus 1500 that was supposed to be for housing. so 4500 overalll. So when tax season comes along, I expect a W-2 or something similar, but instead recieve a 1099-misc with 4500 filled in box 7 (non employee compensation). I should note that when i got my money none was taken out for taxes. Anywho, so bascially my parents took it to a guy who calculated that I owe over 700 dollars in state and federal tax. My parents did not explain my situation to them though, they basically just gave him my form and it was a sort of asian ghetto place. It seems that most of the money comes from line 57 on the 1040 federal form, which is self employment tax. So here is my question, is this done right? I mean is it possible they expect me to pay about 750$ now when I have already spent the money and considering the payment was only 4500. It seems crazy to me that they would put students in such a situation, also it seems odd that i'm getting charged self employment tax. ps. I am a dependent. Well, if you could help me out in anyway it would be real awesome. I'd even be willing to pay you if you could as it would save me 750$.
hope you can help a student with very little money.
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You're screwed. They considered you an independent contractor, not an employee (not the ghetto place, but the NSF). As such, you're responsible for the federal, state, and local income taxes, as well as self-employment taxes of around 15%.
Self employment taxes are:
If you get W-2 wages, notice that you pay 7.65% between FICA and medicare. What you don't see is that your employee matches this. This combined 15.3% goes into the big social security trust fund/medicare fund you hear about in the news so much today. Being self-employed, you need to cover both the employee and employer portion of that, hence the 15% self employment tax. No way to opt out from it, but there are ways to avoid paying it.
Sorry to bear bad news.