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Tax Tips Jan-Feb 2018

January 5, 2018January 5, 2018
by taxpower

JANUARY 16, 2018

Individuals

– Make a payment of your estimated tax for 2017 if you did not pay your income tax for the year through withholding (or did not pay enough in tax that way). Use Form 1040-ES. This is the final installment date for 2017 estimated tax. However, you don’t have to make this payment if you file your 2017 return and pay any tax due by January 31, 2018.

Employers

-For Social Security, Medicare, withheld income tax, and nonpayroll withholding, deposit the tax for payments in December 2017 if the monthly rule applies.

JANUARY 31

All businesses.

-Give annual information statements (Forms 1099) to recipients of certain payments you made during 2017. Payments that are covered include the following: compensation for workers who are not

considered employees; dividends and other corporate distributions; interest; rents; royalties; profit-sharing distributions; retirement plan distributions; original issue discounts; prizes and awards; medical and health care payments; payments of Indian gaming profits to tribal members; debt cancellations (treated as payment to debtor); and cash payments over $10,000. There are different forms for different types of payments.

Employers.

-Give your employees their copies of Form W-2 for 2017. If an employee agreed to receive Form

W-2 electronically, have it posted on a website and notify the employee of the posting. For nonpayroll taxes, file Form 945 to report income tax withheld for 2017 on all non-payroll items, such as backup withholding and withholding on pensions, annuities, and IRAs. Deposit or pay any undeposited tax. If your tax liability is less than $2,500, you can pay it in full with a timely filed return. If you deposited the tax for the year in full and on time, you have until February 12 to file the return.

For Social Security, Medicare, and withheld income tax, file Form 941 for the fourth quarter of 2017. Deposit and pay any undeposited tax. If your tax liability is less than $2,500, you can pay it in full with a timely filed return. If you deposited the tax for the year in full and on time, you have until

February 12 to file the return.For federal unemployment tax, file Form 940 for 2017. If your un-deposited tax is $500 or less, you can either pay it with your return or deposit it. If it is more than $500, you must deposit it. However, if you already deposited the tax for the year in full and on time, you have until February 12 to file the return.

FEBRUARY 2018

February 15

All businesses:

-Give annual information statements (Forms 1099) to recipients of certain payments you made during 2017. Payments that are covered include (1) amounts paid in real estate transactions;(2) amounts paid in broker and barter exchange transactions; and (3) payments to attorneys.

Employers

– For Social Security, Medicare, withheld income tax, and non-payroll withholding, deposit the tax for payments in January if the monthly rule applies.

Individuals

– If you claimed exemption from income tax withholding last year on the Form W-4 you gave your employer, you must file a new Form W-4 to continue your exemption for another year.

February 16

Employers

-Begin withholding income tax from any employee’s pay who claimed exemption from withholding in 2017, but did not provide a new Form W-4 to continue the exemption for 2018.

Mileage Rates-2018

January 3, 2018
by taxpower

The 2018 standard mileage rate for business driving will rise to 54.5 cents a mile, up 1 cent from 2017. Businesses with four or fewer vehicles can use this rate, but each vehicle’s basis must be reduced by the depreciation component…25 cents a mile.

The rate for medical travel and moving will go up 1 cent to 18 cents per mile. For now, the 2018 allowance for charitable driving will stay put at 14 cents a mile because it’s fixed by law, although there is a legislative proposal to annually adjust it.

You can also claim the cost of parking and tolls. But you can’t add the cost of fuel or repairs. Nor can you use these rates if you depreciated or expensed the car.

2017 Payroll and 1099 Reporting due January 31-Message from…

December 22, 2017
by taxpower

Attention businesses: Don’t forget your deadline for filing your Forms 1099 and Payroll reports is January 31, 2018. If you made payments to service providers or other mandated reporting persons, attorney’s, etc. please be certain that you have a signed Form W-9 on file for them now so that this information can be reported on the Form 1099. Lack of a reporting number will cause rejection and possible penalties and deny your deduction for the expenses.

Here is an email that I just received from NYS reminding payroll reporting:

Important Annual Payroll Tax Filing Reminder

The due date is January 31, 2018.

File your annual wage and withholding information (including other payments, such as pensions) timely and accurately.

If you use a payroll service or other preparer, give your annual wage and withholding information to them promptly and accurately. Before the due date, verify that they filed all required information on time.

You may face a penalty if you do not:

provide your employee’s annual wage and withholding information, or
file on time.

Filing methods

Visit our website and choose the filing method that works best for you.

Avoid common errors

Take measures to limit processing delays by avoiding common errors.

Respond quickly if contacted

If your annual wage and withholding information is not filed or contains errors, we may contact you. You must respond immediately with the required information.

Questions?

Visit our website at www.tax.ny.gov (search: TR-150.5)

The Tax Department will never send you an email asking you to validate personal information such as your username, password, or account numbers

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

December 21, 2017December 27, 2017
by taxpower

The new tax will add approximately $1.5 trillion to the national deficit. Most of the tax benefits will go to businesses by lowing the corporate tax rate on corporations (while keeping the double taxation aspect of taxing distributions of previously taxed corporate income to shareholders), lowering income tax rates on pass trough entities such as partnerships and S corporations and moving U.S. international business toward what is known as a territorial scheme of taxation whereby earnings of American owned foreign corporations would no longer be taxed and no longer subject to the complexities of international Subpart F rules. The cost would be partially offset by limitations or eliminations of our precious home ownership deductions (significantly hurting middle class earners residing in relatively high cost of living areas such as parts of California, N.J. and NYS (i.e. Putnam County) where the average cost of living has not increased for most people while state and local income and home real estate and school taxes easily eat up 20% of their disposable net income, as well as other deductions and credits.

Congress has passed the most sweeping overhaul of the federal tax code in three decades. The Republican legislation, which President Trump celebrated on Wednesday, delivers most of its benefits to corporations and the wealthy, but there are key changes that affect individuals.

Unlike the corporate tax cuts, the revisions to the individual code are temporary and expire in 2026. Most of them kick in on Jan. 1, and there are steps you could take in the coming days to maximize new advantages and minimize the potential hit from other changes.

PAY YOUR PROPERTY TAXES EARLY

The legislation sets limits on the amount of state and local taxes that people can deduct. Beginning in 2018, couples filing jointly will be limited to an annual deduction of no more than $10,000 worth of state and local income, sales and property taxes.

Right now, there is no limit on the deduction and the change will be a hard hit to many residents of California and other high-tax states.

Property tax bills generally go out in the fall, with half the taxes due by early December and the other half due by April. If your state and local taxes will be greater than $10,000, you could pay the second installment bill before the end of this year and should still be able to deduct it on your 2017 taxes when you file in the spring, if you itemize.

The legislation doesn’t specifically rule out such a move. But it does prohibit people from pre-paying 2018 state or local income taxes this year and claiming them as an itemized deduction for 2017.

“The bill is pretty clear that you will not be able to prepay, even if you could, your income taxes,” said Darien Shanske, a tax law expert at the UC Davis School of Law. “But it’s silent about property taxes.”

Pre-paying property taxes might not be possible if your mortgage servicer pays them for you from an escrow account. People should contact their servicer.

MAKE AN EXTRA MORTGAGE PAYMENT

The tax overhaul will nearly double the standard deductions for taxpayers who don’t itemize, from $6,350 to $12,000 for individuals, and from $12,700 to $24,000 for couples.

The change is expected to dramatically reduce the number of filers who itemize because fewer people will have total deductions above the new levels.

Given that, taxpayers who anticipate itemizing on their 2017 returns might want to consider making their January mortgage payment before the end of the year.

Doing so would allow you to deduct an extra month of mortgage interest that you might not be able to deduct on your 2018 return if you don’t end up itemizing because of the higher standard deduction.

The tax bill also limits the deduction to interest on as much as $750,000 in mortgage debt, down from the current $1-million limit. People who already own homes still get the higher limit.

But lawmakers added a provision to prevent people from a last-minute scramble to buy homes before the limit goes into effect next year.

Unlike most of the bill’s changes, which take effect on Jan. 1, a taxpayer must have entered into a binding written contract before last Friday to be eligible for the $1-million limit.

GIVE MORE TO CHARITY

Charitable contributions are one of the most popular deductions. But the number of people who itemize is expected to fall sharply. If you think you’ll stop itemizing, you might want to consider making your 2018 contributions by Dec. 31 so you would be able to deduct what you give to charity.

“This might be the year, if they can no longer itemize their charitable donations, to clean out the closet and donate to Goodwill or the Salvation Army or make that extra contribution to your church,” said Kathy Pickering, executive director of the Tax Institute at H&R Block, which provides research and analysis to the company’s tax preparers.

As with an extra mortgage payment, the move makes tax sense only for people who believe they will have enough deductions to itemize on their 2017 return but not when they file 2018 taxes, said Robert Spielman, a partner at Marcum, an independent public accounting and advisory services firm.

The key is estimating your chances of having deductions in 2018 that exceed the new standard deduction level.

If you’re not going to exceed that, maybe you arrange with your parish and prepay your 2018 pledge in 2017.

DEFER OR ACCELERATE INCOME

Individual marginal tax rates are shifting lower, so you’ll generally pay less taxes on the same amount of earnings in 2018 compared with 2017.

People who are self-employed, such as contract workers or freelancers, should consider holding off on sending invoices so the payments come in 2018.

For most people, their federal tax bracket is going to be lower under the tax bill, so it would make sense to defer.

Depending on the size of your family, however, you might not want to make that move. Instead, it might make sense to accelerate any possible income into this year when you might owe less taxes.

The tax bill eliminates the existing $4,050 exemption that can be claimed by taxpayers for themselves, their spouses and their dependents and also reduces taxable income. Those exemptions currently phase out at upper-income levels.

Some of that change is offset by the legislation’s doubling of the child tax credit to $2,000 and making it applicable to higher-income households, as well as adding a $500 family tax credit for dependents other than children.

It all means that some people might have more offsetting family-related deductions this year.

If you have a big family, three or more kids, it might make sense to accelerate the income into this year before the tax bill takes effect next year.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF EXPIRING DEDUCTIONS

Under current law, employees are allowed to deduct unreimbursed business expenses if they total more than 2% of their adjusted gross income.

They include a home office, depreciation on a personal computer required for the job, dues to professional societies and subscriptions to journals and trade magazines.

All of those deductions would disappear through 2025 under the Republican tax bill, so you probably want to move as many of those expenses as you can to this year, such as by re-upping professional journal subscriptions.

A key to tax planning is figuring out which deductions to take in one year and which to postpone until the next.

This year’s a little different because we have a lot of deductions going away.

Foreign Information Report Penalties

December 5, 2017December 5, 2017
by admin

Have you failed to timely file a complete foreign information report such as Forms 5471, 5472, 114, 8938, 3520, 8865 or any of the other forms? If you are not sure what these forms are but you are either a foreign owner in a U.S. business entity or American owner of a foreign business entity or own foreign financial accounts or other specified foreign assets either directly or indirectly through ownership in foreign entities or persons you are probably delinquent. Even if you were not an owner but merely had signing authority with the ability to control monetary transfers of funds in foreign accounts, or a Director or officer of a foreign corporation that was deemed a Controlled Foreign Corporation (or other entity), or if you are the beneficiary of a foreign trust or estate you have information return responsibilities. The bad news is that the IRS or U.S. Treasury Department will assess a non filing or incomplete filing penalty of $10,000 for each and every form and for every year of delinquency once they find out, and with the new information sharing programs between the U.S. and other countries in effect, it is not about if they find out, but more of a matter of when..and there is no statute of limitation to protect you.

The good news is there are government programs available that can help you get caught up with past due income tax returns and foreign information reports and if there is no unreported or unpaid U.S. income tax bringing your tax matters current could be relatively painless if you act now the bring yourself into compliance before the IRS sends you a Notice of Penalty Charge CP215.

The House and Senate Tax Bills

December 4, 2017
by admin

The House and Senate tax bills are a lot alike. Both plans have similar big-picture themes:

Reduce individual rates, pare back some write-offs, slash the corporate rate to 20%, give tax preferences to individual owners of pass-through businesses and move to a territorial tax regime for multinationals.

However, there are also marked differences. We’ll delve into a few of the major ones. The Senate wants temporary individual cuts. This includes lower rates, higher standard deductions and child credit, repeal of the alternative minimum tax, breaks for self-employed persons and owners of pass-through firms, estate tax changes.

The House plan has four individual tax rates, ranging from 12% to 39.6%. The Senate proposes seven rates, starting at 10% and topping out at 38.5%. It’s a close call, but it wouldn’t surprise us to see fewer rates than under current law.

There’s huge disagreement over the popular state and local tax write-off. The Senate wants to fully ax it, while the House has come up with a compromise: End income tax write-offs and cap the deduction for real property taxes at $10,000. We think the Senate will cave when both chambers iron out their differences.

Other itemizations are also in dispute: The home mortgage interest write-off. The House would nix the break for second homes and lower the $1-million ceiling on home acquisition indebtedness to $500,000. These proposals aren’t included in the Senate bill, but there’s a chance they could make it into any final tax legislation.

The write-off for medical costs. The House would do away with this break. The Senate would keep it. We continue to think this deduction will survive in the end.

Turn to the estate tax. The House wants to double the lifetime exemption until 2025, when it would then fully repeal the tax. The Senate would preserve the tax but double the lifetime exemption. Look for the Senate proposal to prevail here.

The treatment of owners of pass-through firms is in flux. The House bill applies a 25% top rate to a portion of a person’s share of income from proprietorships, LLCs, S corporations and partnerships. The Senate calls for a new 17.4% deduction for pass-through income. Both versions contain lots of limitations and anti-abuse rules that have drawn the ire of powerful lobbying groups and at least one GOP senator. We anticipate that these provisions will be substantially revised in any tax package.

New Site In Progress

December 4, 2017December 4, 2017
by admin

After 15 years our old site, built on the Microsoft Front Page Platform, has finally died. We are now in the process of building a new site that we hope that you will find cleaner and easier to use.

The download our most recent tax organizer can now be found on our home page under Individual Income Tax Return Preparation. As before, you will need Adobe PDF to read it.

This new tax law being enacted makes it of critical importance that you review your personal and business tax situation to determine what, if anything, is required by year end in order to maximize deductions or minimize tax on income.

You can contact me if you need assistance prior to year end and we will do our best to summarize those new laws that will impact our clients both domestic and international.