Beware these bad tax eggs

By now on this Easter Sunday, the kids probably have already dived into their Easter baskets, consuming way too much chocolate, in the form of hollow-eared rabbits, and sugar, courtesy of those gooey little Peeps.

And, of course, there are the Easter eggs. There are many explanations as to why the thing of omelets came to be "hunted" on this special Christian holiday; you can read some of them in this Wikipedia entry.

Hunting for Easter eggs naturally brings to mind, for tax geeks anyway, our annual hunt for tax breaks. I’ll post more on these soon; in the meantime, Wells Fargo has compiled a good overview of common deductions.

Bad tax eggs: But the flip side of those beautifully decorated eggs is the occasional bad one that turns up and makes us turn up our noses. That happens in taxes, too.

Bad tax eggs also can be costly. So to help you avoid, or at least not be surprised by, these stinkers in the Internal Revenue Code, below are five rotten tax laws to watch out for. Specifically, these are instances of income on which you might find you owe taxes:

1. Unemployment benefits,
2. Alimony,
3. Forgiven debt,
4. Prize winnings, and
5. Social Security retirement payments.

Details on each of these potentially taxable types of income can be found in this Bankrate story, 5 Terrible Tax Surprises.

Now I’m off to make egg salad for Easter lunch.