Returning Value Blog

Merger and acquisition activity has been brisk in recent years. If your business is considering merging with or acquiring another business, it’s important to understand how the transaction will be taxed under current law.

Here are some of the key tax-related deadlines that apply to businesses and other employers during the second quarter of 2019. Keep in mind that this list isn’t all-inclusive, so there may be additional deadlines that apply to you. Contact us to ensure you’re meeting all applicable deadlines and to learn more about the filing requirements.

In recent years, external auditors have focused more attention on related party transactions. Although related party transactions aren’t necessarily bad, they do raise some concerns about the risk of misstatement or omission in financial reporting.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) brought with it many tax changes for 2018. Those changes left many taxpayers unaware of the caps on state and local tax deductions, the elimination of reimbursed job expenses and the suspension of dependency exemptions, just to name a few. To add to the mix, after Congress passed the law, new withholding tables were not available to employers until mid-January and some did not see the switch in withholding until mid-February. Based on all of these changes, taxpayers are finding themselves below the 90% threshold and therefore would have to pay a penalty. 

In 2018, U.S. organizations that suffered a data breach lost an average of $7.91 million as a result. That’s the highest average organizational cost of all the countries and regions covered in the 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study by IBM and independent research firm Ponemon Institute. Malicious or criminal attacks were the source of more than half of those breaches, rather than system glitches and human errors.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act created a new federal tax credit for employers that provide qualified paid family and medical leave to their employees. It’s subject to numerous rules and restrictions and the credit is only available for two tax years — those beginning between January 1, 2018, and December 31, 2019. However, it may be worthwhile for some businesses.

The Department of Labor (DOL) announced in very late January the 2019 annual adjustments to the civil monetary penalties for a wide range of benefits-related violations. Legislation enacted in 2015 requires annual adjustments to certain penalty amounts by January 15 of each year. Because of the government shutdown, however, the 2019 penalties weren’t published by this deadline and, thus, have a later-than-usual effective date.

If you own a business and don’t have a tax-advantaged retirement plan, it’s not too late to establish one and reduce your 2018 tax bill. A Simplified Employee Pension (SEP) can still be set up for 2018, and you can make contributions to it that you can deduct on your 2018 income tax return.

It’s probably safe to say that most employers have created some form of an employee handbook. But just because your organization has one, that doesn’t mean it’s functional.

Some employers reimburse new hires for moving expenses when they relocate. Others reimburse existing employees whose jobs are moved to other locations. Maybe you do both. Now that there’s no tax deduction for moving expenses incurred by individuals, and no more tax-free treatment for employer moving-expense reimbursements, you might wonder: Does it still make sense to reimburse employees for moving expenses?