A home office must qualify as your principal place of business. This means it must be used:
(1) exclusively and regularly for administrative or management activities of your business or
(2) you have no other fixed location where you conduct substantial administrative or management activities of your trade or business. Examples of administrative or management activities are:
[IRS Instructions for Form 8829, “Expenses for business use of your home”]. Read More
A like-kind exchange is just that, an exchange of things that are similar. Some would say that a Volkswagen Beetle and a Jaguar are not similar, but for tax purposes they could both be business vehicles. The like-kind exchange can be a very useful method for deferring gains on depreciated business vehicles.
If you have a business vehicle, you may or may not want to drive it for 200,000 miles until it totally craps out. Assuming you don’t want to do that and every few years you want a new business vehicle, a like-kind exchange might be the way to go. With the bonus depreciation and Section 179 rules, your business vehicle might not have any tax basis remaining if you took depreciation on all of it already. That 4-year old vehicle might be worth $10,000 and if you sell it, you will recognize a gain of $10,000. Read More
After years of consulting to Tax Partners, Tax Managers, Tax Directors, Associates in accounting firms and law firms, I learned a lot about their professional lives. There was one issue that came up in our conversations over and over again and that was the constant pressure to bring in clients. While working long hours and weekends to get the clients work done, they were under constant pressure to bring in even more clients. It has been this way for years and a solution was needed to take client acquisition pressure off and provide a solution that drives new clients to tax services providers! Imagine all the time that would be saved if clients would come to tax professionals instead of having to spend what little time they had left in a work day to market their tax services. TaxConnections emerged to provide a new age solution that would drive clients to tax Read More
An all important credit risk for purposes of evaluating Offshore Financial Centers is the risk that an intermediary party to a transaction poses with respect to transactions of counter-parties. Offshore Tax Havens provide extraordinary tax regimes and reduced or negligible regulation costs. They are a conduit necessity of international corporate structure in the global economy. But the risks associated with different legal systems and a non-regulatory environment must be part of the evaluation of an Offshore Center. The intention of this writing is to provide an awareness of settlement systems of financial institutions servicing a particular Offshore Financial Center. Understanding the risk inherent in these processes better enables the risk to be managed. Management results Read More
The federal tax collection system is founded on the concept of voluntary compliance. The United States government expects taxpayers to compute and timely pay all taxes owed. Most taxpayers fulfill this obligation. However, a minority refuse to comply. Those falling within the latter category are subject to forced collection and various penalties. This article seeks to provide practitioners with an overview of the mechanics of the federal tax system’s forced collection scheme, with a special emphasis on post-bankruptcy survival of federal tax liens. Read More
The purpose of this IT specification of a Tax Risk Management Web Interface System (phew! a mouthful of IT jargon, but simply put as the “Tax Risk Management Web Interface”) is to determine an organization’s tax risk and from that point forward to help manage that tax risk. The Tax Risk Management Web Interface is one of the key Tax Risk Management tools used.
The following aspects are important in the execution of Tax Risk Management Web Interface: Read More
President Barrack Obama unveiled his $ 3.9 trillion Fiscal Year (hereinafter “FY”) 2015 budget proposal on March 4th. The President’s FY 2015 budget proposal reflects the framework set out in his 2014 State of the Union Address to promote job creation and economic growth. Clearly, the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit (hereinafter “RTC”) was a focal point of his budget as the RTC recently expired on December 31, 2013. It should be duly recalled that the RTC was originally added to the Internal Revenue Code (hereinafter “the Code”) in 1981 as a temporary provision of the Code at a time when research and experimentation based jobs were alarmingly declining in the United States and the RTC was designed to stimulate job growth and investment within the United States and its possessions (e.g., Puerto Rico and Guam). Read More
The news headlines that many multinational companies (MNCs) have been reducing their income tax burden through shifting of income to no- or low-tax countries have resulted in the OEC’s Action Plan on addressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS). The BEPS action plan is very aggressive and comprehensive.
Major countries including China, India and the US are actively involved in the BEPS project.
MNCs are challenged with getting ready for potential regulatory changes that may happen soon to impact their existing tax planning structures that they put in place a few years ago.
THE QUESTIONS PUT to the operations divisions in the business that will require regular review, as part of the Tax Risk Management strategy, will include the following:
• Do you know which perks or fringe benefits are subject to VAT?
• Have you accounted for VAT on any perks or fringe benefits?
• Have you exported any goods or services?
• Have you imported any software over the Internet and accounted for the VAT?
• Are your export documents 100% compliant with the tax regulations? Have you actually Read More
In February 2014, the Internal Revenue Service lost its appeal in the Loving decision. This means that the IRS needs to end its efforts to regulate about 350,000 tax return preparers who are not attorneys, CPAs or Enrolled Agents. So, no testing or continuing professional education requirement for this large group of preparers.
President Obama’s recent budget proposal supports a statutory change to let the Internal Revenue Service resume the program it rolled out in 2010 to regulate all return preparers (see FY2015 Greenbook, page 244). Other proposals exist as well.
What do you think? Should the Internal Revenue be allowed to resume its broader regulation program? Read More
The self-employed businessperson doing business abroad should consider forming an S corporation.
i. Why S Corporations are so Popular Among Small Businesspersons
The short answer is that S corporations allow small businesspersons to avoid paying self-employment taxes on wage payments. Following the lead of C corporation stockholders before them, S shareholders have tried to draw their money out of the Read More
Earlier this year, our management team went to a fantastic conference on how to drive traffic. World class experts taught us quite a bit about driving high traffic! We spent thousands of dollars to learn these techniques, and now we want to turn around and share them with you. If you want more business, if you want to be approached about more tax jobs, if you want to build a great tax reputation, listen to what we teach you at TaxConnections. You must take action though as the changes are coming fast; you must move quickly to adapt or you will be left behind. What I am about to explain to you today is one of the techniques we learned at the conference that drives more traffic to your tax services and tax reputation – the native way.
The traffic experts taught us about banner blindness which basically means people are Read More
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ALERT: Register Today For Tax Partnership Webinar On Thursday May 16th (Free Webinar By Partnership Experts)
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