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Question: Why do you not have pennies or cents in the calculations?
Answer: Our view is that in general, pennies or cents are not meaningful.
We are taking our lead, in this case, from the IRS, which requires all entries on tax return forms to be whole dollar amounts.
In addition, we are frequently dealing with situations in in which is difficult to fit all of the numbers and text on a particular line. To enable numbers to fit as well as possible, we have adopted a rule that all numbers are whole dollar amounts.
Having pennies on the screen would also clutter the screen with additional numbers to read, which would not add any value in terms of informational content.
And, if we had pennies in every entry, people would feel obliged to enter them if they were available. This would take more time on the part of those who are entering the information.
There are a couple of specific locations where people have requested pennies for specific local calculations, and we have rewritten those specific calculations to include pennies.
But in general, we think that it is easier simply to enter whole dollar amounts; that the addition of pennies would add extra time for clients, paralegals and attorneys in entering information; that pennies would take extra space on the screen; that pennies would make the numbers a bit more difficult to read; and that pennies would,not change any results in any meaningful way.