That’s the half
What are you doing to improve for the remainder of the year?
As a business owner, you may be looking at ways to improve your results for the remainder of the year. Are you missing out on sales opportunities? Have you not been able to manage your costs? We all go through these thoughts and discussions in our business. I am always looking for ways to become more efficient and improve the operations of my firm. Recently, we have revamped our website to provide more information and content and to (hopefully) improve the customer process. My goal is to make the customer experience as easy as possible. That may sound funny coming from an accountant (I promise, we care 🙂) but anything we can do to make accounting and tax services less painful, we want to strive to achieve.
So, if you’d like to take a look at our fancy (or not-so-fancy) new website, please take a look here. I’d love any comments you have.
3 Signs Your Biz Needs a Forecast - 1 Sign it Doesn't
A forecast is essentially a crystal ball for looking into your business's future profitability. Here are three indicators it might be time to use one:
You are trying to make strategic business decisions. Does it make sense to expand? Hire more employees? Take out a loan? Any future-looking decision NEEDS data from a forecast to answer these questions.
You have employees. As mentioned above - employees are normally one of the biggest expense-items for a business. Can you make payroll next month? Six months from now? A year from now? A forecast will help you determine what your expected cash balances will be so you can plan well in advance for payroll needs.
You want to be more proactive. The best offense is a good defense. Proactively planning for potential problems in your business, as well as planning for different revenue and cash scenarios, will help you determine what decisions need to be made today, to make you successful tomorrow.
So when do you NOT need a forecast? Is your business model simple (same revenue and expenses coming in each month), big margins, or maybe you're not looking for any growth and have no plan to hire employees. If that's you - then maybe a forecast isn't needed. I will say this though - my business has a pretty simple and predictable model, but I STILL do simple forecasting to 1) make sure I have enough cash coming in to cover taxes at year end 2) make sure I have enough cash coming in to cover expenses if there is a time difference from one month to another and 3) it helps me determine if I need to get new clients in future months if revenues are changing.
Audit-Proof Your Business Mileage
Forget about deducting your G-Wagon for a second, no matter, you need to be able to prove with documentation, the business-use of your vehicle whether you take actual expenses or mileage on your vehicle. And the magic-way we do this? With a mileage log.
So in practice - what is the IRS actually looking for with these logs? You’ll want to remember these four “D’s” for reference.
Distance - how far were you going?
Deets. Or details - where were you going and what were you doing?
oDometer - Beginning and ending mileage on your vehicle for the year
Drive-time that’s not business - (I’m stretching here) This would be total mileage between both personal and business use.
There are apps that can help you with this (MileIQ and certain versions of Quickbooks Online, just to name a few), or you can just track these trips in a spreadsheet.
Be Sure Payroll Taxes Get Paid
Christian Varela, a former owner of Gibraltar Contracting Inc., was sentenced “to two years in prison for failing to pay to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) more than $4.4 million of payroll taxes he collected from his employees” (Internal Revenue Service, 2023, p. 1). “Varela pled guilty to one count of failure to pay payroll taxes in September 2022” (Internal Revenue Service, 2023, p. 1).
“Varela owned and operated Gibraltar Contracting, Inc. (Gibraltar), a contracting firm with more than 55 employees that handled federal and state government construction contracts. Varela was responsible under federal law for collecting, truthfully accounting for, and paying to the IRS federal income tax and contributions to Social Security and Medicare withheld from Gibraltar’s employees’ pay” (Internal Revenue Service, 2023, p. 1). “In 19 different quarters from 2015 through 2018, Varela failed to pay to the IRS a total of more than $4.4 million of these payroll taxes” (Internal Revenue Service, 2023, p. 1).
Read the full article here.
TikTok Trust Schemes
Without fail, every week I will see some “guru” on TikTok parroting forms of Charitable Remainder Annuity Trusts (CRAT) as a way to “avoid” taxes. The idea is this - you take appreciated assets - you donate to a CRAT at your original basis (not the FMV of the appreciated assets), the trust sells the property, you set up an annuity within the Trust, name yourself as the beneficiary (or other family members), and receive annual annuity payments as income, with a remainder portion of the assets in the trust going to a charity of your choosing. With this set-up, the trust doesn’t pay the income tax, the beneficiaries do as they receive it - so it can be a good tax-planning strategy because you stretch income over a period of years, and thus can pay lower effective tax rates.
Where these scammy trust sales-people get this wrong, is they allege that the annuity payment to you isn’t taxable based on their incorrect reading of the tax code and understanding of how trust-accounting works (basically they assert the distributions come from Corpus and thus aren’t taxable, when in reality Corpus has to do with calculating Distributable Net Income, not the taxability of the payments).
A definitive ruling was just made in Gladys L. Gerhardt et al. v. Commissioner reaffirming the taxability of annuity payments to the beneficiaries.
The Gerhardt's, along with some other taxpayers, all contributed assets (most over $1M) to their respective trusts (which were set-up by a law firm) and designed it with a 5-year annuity payment. During that time - none of them reported the bulk of the annuity payments as taxable to them, only a little bit of interest income.
Basically - the Gerhardts and their dummy attorney thought the gain from the sale of the asset, because it happened within the CRAT, would not be taxable. They thought by moving the property into the CRAT, it would receive a step-up in basis to the FMV or the property when it was transferred in, and then upon sale, no gain would be recognized and thus their distribution would be tax-free. Dumb dumb dumb. My personal favorite quote from the ruling is “The gain disappearing act the Gerhardts attribute to the CRATs is worthy of a Penn and Teller magic show. But it finds no support in the Code, regulations, or caselaw."
If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
$65m ERC Fraud Case
This one is crazy. This man submitted false returns claiming over $65M in ERC funds on a non-existent farming businesses. The IRS had refunded $2.7M (which of course the man spent personally) before they caught-on and arrested him.
He’s been charged with 17 counts of making false claims to the IRS - each count comes with a maximum of 5 years in prison, which means he could realistically get life in prison for committing tax fraud.
As Lorilyn Wilson, CPA tells clients - you won’t go to prison if you owe taxes and just don’t pay them, but you absolutely can go to prison for committing tax fraud. It’s not worth it people. See the story here.
Comments