Whalen CPAs: Blog

Many valuable tax breaks expired at the end of 2013. But Congress probably will revive at least some of them, likely retroactively to Jan. 1, 2014. The question is exactly which breaks they’ll extend and when they’ll pass the necessary legislation to do so.

Here are several that may benefit you or your business if extended:

• The deduction for state and local sales taxes in lieu of state and local income taxes,
• Tax-free IRA distributions to charities,
• 100% bonus depreciation,
• Enhanced Section 179 expensing,
• Accelerated depreciation for qualified leasehold improvement, restaurant and retail improvement property,
• The research tax credit,
• The Work Opportunity tax credit, and
• Various energy-related tax incentives.

Please check back with us for the latest information. In the meantime, keep in mind that, if you qualify, you can take advantage of these breaks on your 2013 tax return.

The number of Whalen clients using the firm’s web-based portal service has significantly increased since last January when the service began. About half of all business clients are benefiting from this more efficient, easier and more secure method of exchanging documents with Whalen staff members.

Furthermore, portal service in 2014 will be even better. Now clients may access a number of the portal features from their Apple or Android device through a free mobile app. Just go to iTunes or Google Play and download the NetClient CS app.

The portal service and its free new app are two of the ways that the firm is meeting clients’ expectations for convenient online access to their documents and account information on any device. “We’ve always been known for our professional and friendly service,” says Partner Laura Wojciechowski. “Now clients are adding tech savvy to the way they view our firm.”

Clients can take advantage of the portal service at anytime. A signed service agreement is necessary to start the implementation process. Administrative Specialist Madonna Narog, who is coordinating the portal service, will customize access so information is made available to only those who are authorized. When the secure portal is in operation, clients are able to:

• Download copies of their most recent tax returns and financial statements; no need to call a staff member or hunt for your paper copy.

• Send staff their QuickBooks files, financial statements, or any other files. It is encrypted, simple to use, and much more secure than email.

• Access the portal at anytime and from anywhere they have a high-speed internet connection.

• Receive notification by email when they have new documents to view. Their Whalen accountant will also be notified when they upload a document, saving clients the time of a phone call or email.

With the mobile app, clients can have on-the-go access to important documents and connect with the firm from a variety of mobile devices. The mobile app makes real-time collaboration between Whalen staff members and clients easier, more automated and more convenient.

In January 2013, the firm began charging a $5 monthly fee, billed on an annual basis, to cover the cost of exchanging documents through the client portal or by paper. The paperless service has costs related to set up and maintenance. The printing of documents, supplies and additional staff time account for the expenses related to the paper method.

The decision to switch to a paperless portal is up to each client. For questions about the implementation of the service or the terms of the agreement, contact Madonna by email or by phone at 614-396-4200.

To use the portal service, clients must have one of the latest three versions of Microsoft® Internet Explorer® (IE 8, IE 9 and IE 10), Google Chrome™, Mozilla® Firefox® or Apple® Safari®.

Running a business is filled with regulations that can drain time away from the core of your business. If you ignore them, there may be huge financial consequences. The best way to handle them is to understand your exposure, consult with experts, create a checklist and make sure you’re in compliance.

Brian Stoner, a CPA in Burbank, California, has developed seven compliance items that he believes apply to most businesses and are often overlooked. Go through the list to make sure there aren’t any surprises for your business. If you find some areas where you need some assistance, feel free to contact us, and we’ll help you find out where to get answers.

1. Earned Income Credit (EIC) Notice to Employees
It’s now required annually to notify certain employees about the Earned Income Credit so that more people who need it can take advantage of it. If you have employees, the next deadline for this compliance item is February 7, 2014, and can be met if you get the right W-2 forms. Details are in IRS Publication 15.

2. Corporate Meeting Minutes
Just about the first thing the IRS will ask for in an audit is your corporate meeting minutes. If you are incorporated as a C Corp or S Corp, you need properly formatted and executed documentation of the annual shareholders’ meeting, even if it is just you. The risk in not having it includes a potential increase in tax liability from undocumented deductions.

3. PCI Compliance
PCI stands for Payment Card Industry, and if you take credit cards, you may have compliance requirements under this industry standard. The standard is designed to provide the cardholder with a minimum acceptable level of security, and your requirement is to maintain certain processes and procedures to safeguard the stored credit card data.

4. Document Retention
While it’s a great thing to go paperless, you may get caught by surprise if you are not downloading and preserving the items you used to have on paper. The IRS and other agencies still need proof of these items in order to approve the deduction. This includes invoices that are coming via email in PDFs, bank statements you’ve gone green on, and direct deposit payroll stubs, to name a few.

Fax copies fade after a few years and can catch you by surprise when you go to look up an old record and can no longer read it. It’s best to scan fax receipts in so they will stay readable for the length of the retention period.

You’ll also want to keep up-to-date on how many years it’s necessary to maintain these items in the case of an audit.

5. New Hire Reporting
In a small business, most of us are hiring so infrequently that it’s easy to forget this one. Most state unemployment agencies require that you report new hires within about three weeks of their start date. The purpose of this is to track fathers who have missed child support payments.

6. Changes in State Tax Compliance
As geographic borders disappear and our business expands, we need to regularly re-evaluate state requirements on income, franchise, and sales tax obligations. It can be too easy to “do things the way we’ve always done them” and forget that as our business expands into new territories, new obligations can arise.

If we’ve hired a virtual employee in another state, we may have new obligations. If we’ve earned money during a speaking engagement in another state, we may have income to report in that state. And, of course, if we open new offices in another state, we have new compliance items to deal with.

7. Payroll Posters
Surprisingly, the highest payback item in the list for those of you that have employees may be posting your payroll posters. Compliance usually costs less than $100, and the fines avoided can be as much as $17,000, a pretty big dent, no matter how big your small business is.

The Internal Revenue Service will open the 2014 filing season on January 31, 10 days later than originally planned. The delay is due to the federal government’s partial shutdown for 16 days in October, which caused significant delays in the annual process for updating IRS Systems.

The 2014 start date is one day later than the 2013 filing season opening, one of the shortest tax season in recent years. That delay was due to law changes made by Congress on January 1 under the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA). The extensive set of ATRA tax changes affected many 2012 tax returns.

Despite the late start this year, the April 15 tax deadline, which is set by statute, remains in place. Taxpayers have the option of requesting an automatic six-month extension to file their tax return. The IRS has indicated that it will not process any tax returns before January 31.

According to the IRS, its systems, applications and databases must be updated annually to reflect tax law updates, business process changes and programming updates in time for the start of the filing season.

The October closure came during the peak period for preparing IRS systems for the 2014 filing season. Programming, testing and deployment of more than 50 IRS systems is needed to handle processing of nearly 150 million tax returns. Updating these core systems is a complex, year-round process with the majority of the work beginning in the fall of each year.

The IRS says that about 90 percent of its operations were closed during the shutdown, with some major work streams closed entirely during this period, putting the IRS nearly three weeks behind its tight timetable for being ready to start the 2014 filing season. There are additional training, programming and testing demands on IRS systems this year in order to provide additional refund fraud and identity theft detection and prevention.

With the new year upon us, it’s time to start thinking about 2014 retirement plan contributions. Contributing the maximum you’re allowed to an employer-sponsored defined contribution plan is likely a smart move:

• Contributions are typically pretax.
• Plan assets can grow tax-deferred — meaning you pay no income tax until you take distributions.
• Your employer may match some or all of your contributions pretax.

Also consider contributing to a traditional IRA. If you participate in an employer-sponsored plan, your IRA deduction may be reduced or eliminated, depending on your income. But you can still benefit from tax-deferred growth.
Consider your Roth options as well. Contributions aren’t pretax, but qualified distributions are tax-free.

Retirement plan contribution limits generally aren’t going up in 2014, but consider contributing more this year if you’re not already making the maximum contribution. And if you are already maxing out your contributions but you’ll turn age 50 in 2014, you can put away more this year by making “catch-up” contributions.

For more ideas on making the most of tax-advantaged retirement-savings options in 2014, please contact us.

State law was amended in the most recent budget bill to allow Ohio’s Department of Taxation to require annual commercial activity tax (CAT) taxpayers to file and pay electronically for returns filed on or after January 1, 2014.

CAT is an annual tax imposed on the privilege of doing business in Ohio, measured by gross receipts from business activities in Ohio. Businesses with Ohio taxable gross receipts of $150,000 or more per calendar year must register for the CAT, file all the applicable returns and make all corresponding payments.

Taxpayers may file and pay electronically through the Ohio Business Gateway at business.ohio.gov. Alternatively, annual taxpayers may use TeleFile as a means for filing and paying the annual CAT return electronically beginning in April 2014.

For tax periods beginning on January 1, 2014, and thereafter, the annual minimum tax (AMT) is a tiered structure, and taxpayers pay an amount that corresponds with their overall commercial activity. The taxpayer uses the previous calendar year’s taxable gross receipts to determine the current year’s AMT. For more information, please refer to information release CAT 2013-05 – Commercial Activity Tax: Annual Minimum Tax Tiered Structure- Issued October, 2013.

Beginning in calendar year 2013, calendar quarter taxpayers applied the full $1 million exclusion amount to the first calendar quarter return for that calendar year and were eligible to carry forward and apply any unused exclusion amount to subsequent calendar quarters within that same calendar year. Any unused exclusion amount from calendar year 2012 was not able to be carried forward into calendar year 2013.

The IRS has issued the 2014 optional standard mileage rates used to calculate the deductible costs of operating an automobile for business, charitable, medical or moving purposes.

Beginning on January 1, 2014, the standard mileage rates for the use of a car (also vans, pickups or panel trucks) will be:

• 56 cents per mile for business miles driven, down from 56.5 cents per mile in 2013
• 23.5 cents per mile driven for medical or moving purposes, down from 24 cents per mile in 2013
• 14 cents per mile driven in service of charitable organizations, unchanged from 2013

The standard mileage rate for business is based on an annual study of the fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile. The rate for medical and moving purposes is based on the variable costs.

Taxpayers always have the option of calculating the actual costs of using their vehicle rather than using the standard mileage rates.

A taxpayer may not use the business standard mileage rate for a vehicle after using any depreciation method under the Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System (MACRS) or after claiming a Section 179 deduction for that vehicle.  In addition, the business standard mileage rate cannot be used for more than four vehicles used simultaneously.

These and other requirements for a taxpayer to use a standard mileage rate to calculate the amount of a deductible business, moving, medical, or charitable expense are in Rev. Proc. 2010-51.  Notice 2013-80 contains the standard mileage rates, the amount a taxpayer must use in calculating reductions to basis for depreciation taken under the business standard mileage rate, and the maximum standard automobile cost that a taxpayer may use in computing the allowance under a fixed and variable rate plan.

For 2013, the maximum IRA contribution is $5,500 — $6,500 if you’re age 50 or older on Dec. 31. (The maximum IRA contribution or deduction may be reduced or eliminated depending on various factors.) But if you’re self-employed, you may be eligible for a retirement plan that allows you to make much larger contributions. As long as you set up one of the following plans by Dec. 31, 2013, you can make deductible 2013 contributions as late as the 2014 due date of your tax return:

Profit-sharing plan. This allows discretionary contributions and flexibility in plan design. The 2013 contribution limit is $51,000 ($56,500 for taxpayers age 50 and older).

Defined benefit plan. This plan sets a future pension benefit and then actuarially calculates the contributions needed to attain that benefit. So you may be able to contribute more to a defined benefit plan than to a profit-sharing plan. The maximum future annual benefit toward which 2013 contributions can be made is generally $205,000.

Various caveats and limits apply, so contact us for details. But act soon; there’s not much time left to set up a plan for 2013.

Every December are your employees scrambling to use up their vacation time because of limits on what they can roll over to the new year? Or do you allow rollovers and have long-time employees who’ve built up large balances that create a significant liability on your books? Then you may want to consider a paid time off (PTO) contribution arrangement that allows employees with unused vacation hours to elect to convert them to retirement plan contributions.

If the plan has a 401(k) feature, it can treat these amounts as a pretax benefit, similar to normal employee deferrals. Alternatively, the plan can treat the amounts as employer profit sharing, converting the excess PTO amounts to employer contributions.

If you’d like to offer this option, you simply need to amend your plan. However, you must still follow the plan document’s eligibility, vesting, rollover, distribution and loan terms, and additional rules apply. Please contact us for more information on the ins and outs.

Maybe. Deductions are more valuable when tax rates are higher, and higher-income taxpayers face higher rates in 2013. But the return of the itemized deduction reduction could make your donation deduction less valuable. Also keep in mind that the amount of your deduction depends on various factors, including what you give. For example:

Long-term capital gains property. This might be stocks or bonds held more than one year. You may deduct the current fair market value. You also avoid any tax you’d pay on the gain if you sold the property. So such property can make one of the best donations.

Tangible personal property. Your deduction depends on the situation:

• If the property isn’t related to the charity’s tax-exempt function (such as an antique donated for a charity auction), your deduction is limited to your basis.
• If the property is related to the charity’s tax-exempt function (such as an antique donated to a museum for its collection), you can deduct the fair market value.

Services. You may deduct only your out-of-pocket expenses, not the fair market value of your services. You can deduct 14 cents per charitable mile driven.

It’s important to pay attention to the many additional rules and limits that apply. If you don’t, your benefit could be smaller than expected. So before making a significant donation, please contact us to find out the tax benefit you’ll receive.

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