Get real.  You sound like someone who has always had cash-management problems with a tax business and is trying to project that on someone else.  What's really going on here is that preparers in farm country would like to get those returns out of the way by March 1 so they can focus on non-farm returns for the last six weeks of tax season.  I think special treatment for farmers is an archaic privilege that should be repealed, or extended to everyone who doesn't know their income until some of the December K-1s are received or transactions are recorded.  But as long as the farm lobby has 5% of the vote, nothing will happen.  Just look at the uproar over Trump and Musk freezing the farm welfare payments (while denying it's happening).

What I wrote is that someone could have a $200K NOL from 2023, then a $100K profit in 2024.  Do you agree they are required to use Form 172?  And they're still going to have a balance due from SE tax, right?  And I thought Terry53029 meant “balance due” instead of refund. But maybe Terry doesn’t do joint returns, when one spouse has a job with tax withheld on wages; or returns for farmers who also hold W-2 jobs between harvest and planting. (My Kamman ancestors from southern Indiana used to work part of the year in the Louisville packing plants to help their cash flow.)  Of course for the March 1 benefit to be claimed, most of the gross has to come from farming, right? So there’s that.