Section 1: 30–40%T1
Advanced Individual Income Tax Computations
Exam Insight
TCP tests your ability to assemble a complete individual tax liability from many moving parts, then plan around it. You must correctly stack ordinary income, capital gains, NIIT, additional Medicare tax, self-employment tax, and AMT, and then project across years to manage brackets.
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What AICPA Wants You to Know
- 1Layer ordinary income and capital gains using the capital-gain stacking rules to find the correct 0/15/20 percent rate.
- 2Compute the 3.8 percent net investment income tax and the 0.9 percent additional Medicare tax using the correct MAGI and wage thresholds.
- 3Calculate self-employment tax and the related deductions, including the one-half SE tax deduction.
- 4Work the alternative minimum tax (AMT) computation, adding back common preferences and applying the 2025 exemption and phaseout.
- 5Apply multi-year projection techniques: bracket management, timing of income and deductions, and gain/loss harvesting.