Tax Strategies

Last week, one of the “girlie” cable channels had a weeklong Christmas-in-July event, where they showed Christmas movies the whole week. (In case you’re wondering, it’s my wife, not me, who watches this particular channel). But the thought occurred that if it’s time to start thinking about Christmas, then it’s also time to begin considering end-of-year tips and planning strategies to offer clients as we approach the beginning of fall.

Senators Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, led a bipartisan group of five senators in introducing legislation to increase the alternative tax liability limitation for small property and casualty insurance companies.

The deadline is coming up this week for lawmakers in Congress to submit their preferences for the “must have” tax breaks that need to be kept in the Tax Code under Senate Finance Committee leaders’ “blank slate” approach to tax reform.

Last month’s Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Windsor held section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act to be unconstitutional.

A pair of lawmakers plan to introduce bipartisan legislation in the House that would provide permanent tax incentives to family farmers, ranchers and other land owners who choose not to develop their land and instead preserve their property for conservation.

Your client has a successful closely held business. Perhaps your client has already indicated that, at some indeterminate point in the future, the business will be sold. Even if your client has not given such an indication, you are well advised to at least broach the topic as a matter of long-term contingency planning.

Conservative economist Dr. Arthur Laffer has co-written a study that identified a positive economic impact in efforts to require online retailers to collect sales taxes from customers on Internet purchases.

The international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has produced an action plan at the request of the G20 finance ministers to address the problems of base erosion and profit shifting that are depleting corporate tax revenue as multinational companies transfer their profits to low-tax countries.

Captive insurance companies, once the exotic plaything of large corporations, are now open and advantageous to much smaller companies. But most accountants don’t know enough about captive insurance companies to advise their business clients on the advantages of starting their own, according to Brian McCormick and Jerry Messick of Elevate Captives LLC.

For some companies that got a temporary reprieve from the IRS in the height of the recession, the payback isn’t going to be as bad as they expected.