04/30/10 Well, I guess I didn't do very well keeping my blog up to date during tax season.  I will do better the rest of the year. I recently read an article regarding the new health care bill in a newsletter from CCH-a Wolters Kluwer business, one of the main tax research companies.  The main point for 2010 - 2013, small businesses are eligible for a 35% tax credit for premiums paid for employee health coverage.  They state a "small business" has no more than 25 emplyees with average annual wages less than $50,000.  Businesses can exclude the owner's compensation from this calculation. There are other issues relating to additional taxes but they start in 2013 or 2014 which I will either include in the newsletter section or detail at another time. 01/25/10 Haiti Relief Donations People who give to charities providing earthquake relief in haiti can claim these donations on the tax return they are completing this season according to IRS.  Taxpayers who itemize deductions on their 2009 return qualify for this special tax relief provision enacted Jan. 22, 2010.  Only cash contributions made to these charities after Jan. 11 and before March 1, 2010 are eligible.  This includes contributions made by text messge, check, credit card or debit card.  The new law only applies to cash contribtions (as opposed to property).  These contributions must be specifically for the Haiti relief.  Taxpayers have the option of deducting these contributions on their 2009 or 2010 tax returns. 01/06/10 We are pleased to announce that we have completed the upgrade of our Client portal.  Our clients will now be able to see their tax organizer, tax returns and source documents, accounting documents and .   Business clients can now send up QuickBook files, excel spreadsheets and other types of files to their portal so we can access them securely.  This service is available to other clients as well if requested.  The clients that tested this service have loved the ease of obtaining their information and the fact they no longer have to keep track of paper. We may offer in the future a service of scanning your documents into the client portal.  Please let us know if this is something you'd be interested in. 11/30/09 IRS has announced that in February 2010, they will begin it's first Employment Tax National Research Project (ET NRP) in 25 years.  IRS will randomly select 2,000 business taxpayers each year for the next 3 years to examine their employment tax returns and issues.  The 2 main goals for the ET NRP are: To secure statistically valid information for computing the Employment Tax Gap and To determine compliance characteristics so IRS can focus on the most noncompliant emplyment tax areas. Employment tax noncompliance can be THE MOST COSTLY expense of a business.  The penalty for noncompliance can be as high as 10% per incident and the penalty itself is nondeductible for tax purposes.  The  ET NRP examinations are in addition to the regular audits IRS conducts every year.