When your business is purchasing equipment, it is important to determine how you will be depreciating it for tax purposes. There are a number of different options that allow you to take the tax benefits up front in the year you purchase it, or they can be spread out over a number of years. Understanding all of your options will help you to make the right decision based on your company needs. The specific details of Read More

Court is a scary word to many people. The U.S. Tax Court, however, doesn’t send taxpayers to jail or place them on probation. You won’t have to worry about posting bail or paying huge fees. The U.S. Tax Court is where taxpayers (individuals or businesses) may settle questions about income tax imposed by the IRS. This Court is not directly affiliated with the IRS—you don’t have to worry about playing in the IRS’s Read More

Anyone who’s interacted with the IRS lately knows how poorly things are going with the agency—taxpayers can’t seem to get a human being on the other side of the phone. Some of these frustrating delays are due to forces outside the agency’s control, like the pandemic and a shrinking budget, but that doesn’t make taxpayers’ situations any more palatable. Inattention from the IRS can be more than just frustrating for Read More

Even though meetings with your IRS auditor or revenue office are not criminal interrogations, it can certainly feel that way. As a result, many taxpayers consider recording any meetings they have with IRS representatives.  The Internal Revenue Code allows taxpayers to record in-person interviews if they meet certain conditions prior to the meeting. These conditions include:  Requesting, in writing, to record the Read More

We recently published a blog detailing the immense difficulty taxpayers have had in reaching an actual human being at the IRS. Years of budget cuts caught up with the federal agency as the pandemic produced a backlog of returns and requests.  The IRS provided a number of relief options in the early part of 2020, including moving the reporting deadline from April 15 to July 15. Most of those relief options expired, Read More

Anyone who has tried calling the IRS recently probably did not reach a human being. This ongoing problem worsened not long after the U.S. declared the COVID-19 pandemic a national emergency in March 2020. Even though it is business as usual in many parts of the country, IRS employees are working through a sizable backlog of paperwork and requests.  These frustrations are quite salient for taxpayers whose IRS Read More

You don’t have to be a tax professional to know that a tax audit is not on anyone’s wish list. Most taxpayers think of an audit as a tremendous invasion of privacy wherein they have to produce documentation of every dollar they’ve ever earned. Some audits do require taxpayers to show numerous financial documents.  Chances are, though, that if you are audited, you will never speak face-to-face with an IRS agent, Read More

In April 2018, the three major credit reporting bureaus announced a shift in procedures: they would cease including federal tax liens on credit reports. This was welcome news to individuals and businesses struggling to pay tax debts. There are still several other ways, though, that tax liens (federal and state) can indirectly affect one’s credit and overall financial wellbeing.  What is a Tax Lien? When an Read More