Reilly’s Sixteenth Law of Tax Planning – Being right without substantiation can be as bad as being wrong – is particularly apt when it comes to charitable contributions. The case law makes it clear that there is not much wiggle room in rules relating to substantiation and reporting of charitable contributions. We’ll dig into the rules here.

At some point, accounting becomes more than compliance. It's years of watching businesses evolve, owners under pressure, and consequences unfold. We soon recognize the gap between what clients ask for and what they need. That quiet, steady understanding, grounded in experience, shapes the growth-minded accountant.

A federal district court just struck down an IRS rule that had been closing the door on a pretty compelling tax savings opportunity available to your clients today, the Section 48E Clean Electricity Investment Tax Credit. The ruling, handed down on June 6, 2026, reinstated a key pathway that allows investors to lock in credit eligibility for large-scale wind and solar projects a pathway the IRS had tried to eliminate just last year. The window is not wide open. July 4, 2026 is still the critical deadline, and the government will almost certainly appeal. But for advisors who act quickly, this ruling creates a genuine, time-sensitive planning opportunity. Here is what you need to understand, and what you should be doing right now.

Tax Day is finally in the rearview mirror, and if you’re like many practitioners—with the phones quieter, the inbox manageable, and the September extension wave feeling comfortably far away—the temptation right now is to coast. Resist that temptation. Summer is the only stretch of the calendar when both you and your best clients have the bandwidth to think strategically; furthermore, this summer, there is a deadline-driven opportunity. In this article, I’ll walk through three moves every practitioner should be making between now and Labor Day. The first move has a hard statutory deadline of July 10, 2026. The second move is about turning your highest-value client conversations into billable advisory engagements. And third is about tending to the practice itself because a tax practice, like a garden, doesn’t survive without care.

Perhaps the most misunderstood aspect of partnership taxation relates to distributions. When a partnership distributes cash or property to its partners, the tax consequences can range from completely tax-free to significantly taxable, depending on how the distribution is structured and the partners' tax basis in their partnership interests. In this article, we'll explore the rules governing partnership distributions and how they impact partners' tax situations. More importantly, we'll look at strategies to structure distributions in the most tax-efficient manner possible – because the goal is not just to understand the rules but to use them advantageously.

The Jeffrey Winick tax story is about one of the simplest methods of not paying taxes. That simple method of not paying is simply not paying. Winick is a very successful real estate broker specializing in retail leases. The company he founded, Winick Realty (now rebranded RTL), has in the past been listed as one the top five of retail brokers in New York City. As far as my friend Grok can discern, Winick managed all this with no formal education beyond high school. That makes it extra impressive. I identify with him just a bit. He grew up in Kew Gardens Hill, Queens, New York, and is 75 years old. I also grew up not far from Manhattan and am 74. I sometimes fantasize about living in Manhattan. He's living there, and apparently he was really living. His lifestyle was a major topic in the litigation.

I'm almost nostalgic for the days of 2021-2022, the COVID-induced tsunami of Tax Court filings and cases. This month we've seen only eight T. C. Memos, of which two were routine undocumented deduction cases (Section 6001 or Section 274), no Sum. Ops, and no T. C.s. It's been years since practitioners murmured the old, nearly-forgotten slogan as they booked their summer vacations: "File in May and go away," but it may be time again. Here's what happened.

We’ve all been there. A client walks into your office and, somewhere in the conversation, you realize that a seemingly minor oversight, a missed deadline, a form nobody filed, an election nobody mentioned, has spiraled into a five- or six-figure tax problem. In my years of practice, some of the most expensive mistakes I’ve seen weren’t the result of aggressive planning gone wrong. They were small, quiet errors. The kind that happens when a deadline slips, an election isn’t made, or a form gets overlooked entirely. The tax code is unforgiving in these situations, and the IRS has little sympathy for “I didn’t know.” This article walks through some of the most common, and most costly, small mistakes that can devastate your client’s tax situation, along with practical guidance for avoiding them.