Returning Value Blog

Key rules for job-related expenses

Are you planning a move in the near future? Be aware of special tax rules for deducting moving expenses on your personal tax return. In some cases, moving expenses are fully or partially deductible, while other times they are not.

With the 2017 tax season fast approaching, I wanted to pass along a few tips and timelines to any executor or trustee who will be filing Form 1041 income tax filings for trust and estates, as well as Form 709 gift tax. Filing Fiduciaries of estates and complex trusts have the option to treat certain distributions as having occurred last year. An election can be made with respect to distributions made within 65 days after the end of a tax year.

Strategic planning for the coming year

Do you know where your business budget is?

This is the traditional time to draw up a budget for the coming year. Perhaps the way you previously developed the budget for your business has not been overly successful. Or maybe you have found as the year goes along that certain key factors were ignored or not given enough weight. In that case, the way you usually put together the budget may not be the best approach for your business.

As the dust settles from President-elect Donald Trump’s historic victory in this year’s presidential contest and the Republican sweep of the U.S. House and Senate, it is now possible to envision potentially significant tax legislation changes being proposed as early as 2017. The tax cuts proposed by President-elect Trump are among the largest proposed since the days of Ronald Reagan. Assuming that he follows up on these proposals and sticks to his promises, there are several major changes that the Trump administration seeks to make on individual and business taxes:

Form 1099-MISC: is an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax return document that covers reporting for a wide range of payments made to non-employee individuals (e.g., independent contractors) over the course of the year on behalf of your trade or business.  Personal payments are not reportable.

This past summer President Obama signed into law, a bill that included changes to due dates for certain tax returns. These changes had been proposed by AICPA members who wanted a more logical chronology so that information taxpayers needed to file 1040s or 1120s would be available on time. 

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) released the Accounting Standards Update (ASU) 2016-14, Not-for-Profit Entities (Topic 958): Presentation of Financial Statements of Not-for-Profit Entities on Aug. 18, and you can read the full ASU here.