Business Strategies

Here we are in the thick of another tax season and tax professionals everywhere are bemoaning the standard litany of issues: unreconciled bank accounts, balance sheets that don’t balance, unfiled 1099s, etc. It doesn’t have to be this way, at least not for you and your clients. Tax season is actually the perfect time to review and/or set and implement best practices for tax and accounting compliance in your clients’ businesses—and yours. Physician, heal thyself.

What is one thing that most business owners have in common? Why did you start your business? Many business owners I have talked to over the past decade started their entrepreneurship journey for similar reasons. Think about your clients and what reasons they have given you and see if these ring true. “I want to be in control of my time.” “I need to spend more time with my family.” “I don’t want a cap on my earning potential.” I find those to be pretty noble reasons. I haven’t come across a business owner yet that says, “I want to pay more taxes for fun.”. So as an advisor how can we help our clients have freedom, time with family, and save on taxes? One strategy is to hire family members. It can’t be any family member though, remember there is a strategy to this. I know some of you are thinking, “that sounds great!”. Then others of you are thinking, “who wants to work with their family?”. Well trust me, when saving money is the topic of discussion more people tend to listen. The least you can do is present your clients with the facts, and here they are: • The taxpayer can avoid paying certain payroll taxes by hiring a family member. • You can help them potentially drop a tax bracket while keeping the spending power in the family. • Protecting a spouse from tax debt. • Lower Federal student loan payments. To do this we have to make sure the client hires their family as employees. This whole strategy goes down the drain if the family member is a contractor that receives a 1099. Today we will focus on how to properly implement the game plan when hiring a parent or spouse.

If you build a mini business empire and it subsequently fails, a small consolation prize might be a net operating loss carryover that will shelter some or all of your more modest income for many years. Of course NOLs are only one among many carryovers that need tracking. In my experience the tracking often leaves much to be desired. Changes in tax preparers or even software can result in the loss of valuable carryovers. But that is not the worst of it...

The first rule of good writing is “Know your audience.” I would argue that this rule applies to your tax practice as well. Tax professionals, it's time to find your audience. If you want to be the best tax professional you can be, while preserving your physical and mental health, take a moment (or several) to define your ideal client. Your ideal client is your audience. Deciding which clients you want to work with will serve you well during tax season and beyond...

I'm new here, but I know enough not to try to do what everyone else does. I won't try to cover the wider tax picture. I cover United States Tax Court on my blog, so here's a brief round-up on what went on in Tax Court during the last month that I think is of interest to the tax planner and practitioner...

Join nationally recognized speaker and educator Matt Metras, EA, as he guides you through the ins and outs of mining, staking, forks, airdrops, DeFi swaps, yield farming, liquidity pools, NFTs, and more. With little guidance in these areas, you'll learn how to apply existing code sections to cryptocurrency situations, with a focus on finding tax-saving opportunities. We'll also cover how to extract transactions from the blockchain and introduce you to a number of helpful tools. This two-hour course is packed with valuable information, but it’s more than just information - we're also offering continuing education credits to qualifying attendees, courtesy of the American Institute of Certified Tax Planners.

When United States Tax Court Judge Paris issued the opinion in the case of Ryan Fleischer in 2016 , it caused quite a stir in the tax blogosphere. And from what I have been able to gather off the record it remains of interest. The Fleischer decision makes it very difficult, if not impossible for some financial professionals to use S corporations to mitigate self-employment tax. Rather than attack on reasonable salary, the IRS took an assignment of income approach, which succeeded throwing planners for financial professionals like Fleischer into a bit of an uproar...

The IRS is deploying technology and big data to combat compensation under-reporting. What does this likely mean for you and your S Corps? That Reasonable Compensation challenges will likely occur outside the traditional exam process. A challenge may come from the ongoing Employment Tax Program or the recently launched CIP. From our polling, we find most tax advisors and their S Corp clients are dangerously unprepared for an IRS reasonable compensation challenge. If you are working with S corps, here’s the news you need to know...