Withholding Allowance and Projected Tax Calculator - Landon Brock

This past summer when I began my internship I began making money again. Unfortunately, with making money there comes a mandatory expense of taxes. The government has a withholding system in place where an employer automatically withholds part of your paycheck for immediate tax payment to the IRS. That withholding amount is based upon a formula which is dependent upon the amount of money you make for the month, your filing status, and your number of allowances. This formula is calculated based upon forecasted earnings over the course of a 12 month period. As a result of the withholding system, during my internship I would be taxed at a rate forecasted based upon me earning my internship salary over the course of 52 weeks, whereas I would only be at the internship for 10 weeks. Not making that money over the course of a whole year would result in less income for the year, placing me in a lower tax bracket and therefore ultimately liable for less taxes. The government would be taking excess money out in the form of the withholding.

In order to solve this problem, I created this Spreadsheet and VBA program that would allow me to input estimated variables of my tax calculation, and then tell me what my estimated tax liability will be at the end of the year. It would then subtract what payments have been made aside from the internship. It would then determine how much money would have to be withheld during the internship to meet that liability. From here it was a matter of using goal seek to match the right number of allowances needed to meet that liability.

In execution of this project, the main VBA elements are the forms that step the user through filling out the various elements of one’s taxes such as basic info, deductions, adjustments, credits, etc. Additional code was written for some manipulation of the spreadsheet, executing the goal seek process, as well as calculating the tax liability.