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Remind Your Clients About Higher-Education Tax Credits
A new school year is here and, for many families, so are the worries over the cost of tuition and other college expenses. The cost keeps skyrocketing every academic year, and these days that diploma comes with an average of almost $29,000 in debt for most graduates. Many of them also carry that debt well into middle age. Families paying for these educations need every break they can get. The federal government offers education tax credits (and other tax breaks on college costs), but don’t assume your client has the brain space at this stage of life to learn about them. Even your clients who can afford college would appreciate learning about ways to save on higher education. Here’s what to tell them.
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Games Industry Lore 101: Basics Tax Practitioners Should Know
When building your book of business, especially small business clients that do the heavy lifting due to their recurring complex tax filings, you might ponder seeking out clients in the video games industry. Salivating at the prospect of capturing just a tiny sliver of that nearly half-trillion market valuation as your social media feeds flood with news and memes from a random indie game you’ve never heard of, you wonder how to attract and retain game developer clients. But there’s several things that tax practitioners should know about how the games industry works, and its innumerable oddities, before diving head-first into taking on game developers as business or individual clients. Ready to press play?

The NIL Tax Playbook
Regardless of where you stand on the issue, student athletes have been able to tap into a new revenue stream since July 1st, 2021. This is when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) began to allow students to profit from their name, image, and likeness (NIL). Which leads to new tax implications for a group of taxpayers who may have never filed a tax return before. As this has unfolded, it reminded me of taxpayers who were on the forefront of making money online. It was something new, so not many taxpayers or even tax practitioners knew how to handle it. It was real money, but was it really a business? I’ve loved seeing it evolve. Now, right off the back of COVID-19, we have student athletes who are able to take advantage of their online presence and also make money. But the income people were making 20 years ago online is pennies compared to what some students can make through NIL deals. In 6 short years, students have gone from not being able to profit monetarily from their likeness while competing as a student to now potentially making millions.

D&A Planning After the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
After 2021, whether an expenditure was deducted currently or recovered through depreciation often affected timing, but it typically did not create a meaningful advantage from a Section 163(j) perspective. The restoration of depreciation, amortization, and depletion addbacks in the computation of adjusted taxable income (“ATI”) has changed that analysis and created a new opportunity for taxpayers with actual or anticipated interest limitation exposure. As a result, taxpayers should reconsider whether certain expenditures that historically may have been deducted immediately can instead be capitalized into depreciable or amortizable property in order to improve their Section 163(j) profile.
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