Start 2020 Tax Planning Now
Tax planning for 2020 is incredibly important. LGA Managing Partner John Geraci, CPA, MST is asking clients to reach out as soon as possible to get started. Whether you’ve had a great year, a difficult one, received a PPP loan or encountered any other number of unique situations, now is the time to start working with your accountant to take a strategic approach to your taxes. For more information, contact the team at LGA.
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Full Transcript:
Hi, this is John Geraci, managing partner at LGA, and I’m here today to actually appeal to our clients. We need your help. As you know, it’s been a crazy year, uh, and it’s not over, obviously we’ve been through a lot this year with COVID, uh, and all of the impact it’s had on us as individuals and our businesses. And we’ve sort of started this reopening process and in this, in the early summer, and as we head into Q4, we’re really not sure what to expect. We don’t know if things are going to change if there’s going to be further shutdown. So we’re obviously processing a lot. It’s been an interesting year for businesses. Some businesses have thrived throughout all of this, and unfortunately other businesses have suffered greatly throughout all of this. And there was some relief in the PPP funds. Um, and even when you look at the PPP funds, there’s still so much confusion as we sort of move into the forgiveness phase.
Uh, that’s, that’s, that’s pretty set at this point. Um, there’s still some things that they’re working out with respect to, what’s going to be automatically forgiven, uh, versus where you’re gonna have to submit an application, but something that’s still hanging out there is the taxation of the PPP forgiveness. Again, Congress originally intended for this to be a tax-free forgiveness process. And so they had indicated that the income from the forgiveness would be tax free. Uh, the IRS came out a couple of weeks later, back in April and said, that’s fine. It’s tax-free from the income side, but we’re just going to disallow the expenses that were paid with the PPP funds, essentially making it a taxable event. So Congress did immediately respond and say, Hey, that’s not what we intended IRS. We’re going to put out some legislation that corrects that. And to this day they still haven’t.
So a lot of uncertainty. So what I’m asking for our clients to do is really pull together your information, reach out to your LGA team member and send in your information as soon as possible. We want to do tax planning. And we want to do tax planning if you’ve had PPP funds, we want to do it under two scenarios. One, what if you got PPP and it’s forgiven and taxable, and one, what if you have PPP and it’s forgiven, but not taxable. We obviously want to understand the impact of if you’ve had a bad year, what those losses are doing to your taxable situation and whether or not there’s a change that we can make and withholdings and estimates. And obviously to the, on the other side, if you’ve had a great year and it’s actually resulted in higher taxes, potentially, do we want to get out in front of that as well?
So please reach out to your team. See if you can get your information to us as soon as possible business information, personal information, anything that you can do as soon as possible to put us in a position to help you stay, stay way out in front of this. And so that as we sort of roll into Q4 and all the legislation, that’s going to continue to come out, we’re prepared and you’re prepared to respond accordingly. So I appreciate your help and support in making sure that we can service you to the best of our ability. Thank you.