Bailey Accounting & Co.

09/30/2022

Hello everyone! Treasury today released the final Corporate Transparency Act regulations yesterday.
In a nutshell: beneficial owners of US entities have to file a form with FinCEN upon entity formation. This is not a tax form; it will be more like an FBAR (Foreign Bank & Financial Accounts). The rule does not take effect until January 1, 2024.

Existing entities have one year from that date to comply with the law and file the form. It is only filed once unless there is a change in ownership.

10/06/2021

Why are tax firms fees going up?
Why can't anyone reach the IRS with a phone call?
Here's why.

A company called EnQ autodials the IRS' phone lines and then sells favorable slots in the tax agency's lengthy hold queue.

07/08/2021

On July 1, 2021 Erin Collins, the Taxpayer Advocate, released her annual IRS report. Here is some of the information in that report that you may wish to pass on to your clients that are still awaiting refunds or responses:

• The IRS has a current backlog of 35 million unprocessed individual and business tax returns that require manual processing. This is more than 5 times as many as were manually processed in 2019;
o A little less than half of the backlog is paper tax returns awaiting processing, with most of the rest tax returns that were suspended during processing and requiring further review. Of the suspended returns, a large number were flagged because of discrepancies between recovery rebate credits claimed by taxpayers and what IRS records indicate the taxpayer qualifies for.
o Also flagged were many returns of taxpayers who elected to use their 2019 earnings instead of their 2020 earnings to claim a larger earned income tax credit or additional child tax credit as allowed by the Cares Act. Of course the very idea here was to quickly provide refunds where needed, but reality has meant that these poor taxpayers not only did not get the refund quickly, they got boomeranged into a delay and still don’t have it!
o Ms. Collins observed that all most taxpayers can do is wait for the backlog to clear!
o Adding to the backlog is a sharp increase in the number of returns flagged as suspicious: 3.7 million as of May 2021, compared with just 1.3 million in all of 2019, the report found.

• IRS received more phone calls during the 2021 filing season alone than it had ever received in a full fiscal year, with over four times as many calls as in the prior filing season.
o The IRS’s highest-volume phone line for individual income tax assistance clocked roughly 85 million calls, only 3 percent of which went through to a live IRS customer service representative.

07/08/2021

Spirits on the Farm is an annual event hosted by the Oswego Chamber of Commerce and this year, the Kendall County Fairgrounds. The event will feature the best craft distilleries, food vendors, artisan crafts, and live music! ID's required when picking up tickets.

06/22/2021

The portal to opt out of the monthly child tax credit payments is now live:

Find details about the advance Child Tax Credit payments, including how to get them or stop getting them.

05/08/2021

We all knew it was bad... but it seems this is just unspeakable.

The Internal Revenue Service is having a tough time processing tax returns this year. Among the many challenges: Out-of-order printers and copiers.

05/06/2021

This year, one of the questions on your personal tax return was, “At any time during 2020, did you receive, sell, send, exchange, or otherwise acquire any financial interest in any virtual currency?”

Now this comes to light...
Remember when your tax professional asks you a question, they are asking for a reason. We are trying to minimize any issues later on and correctly file your tax return.

A federal court in the United States has authorized the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to serve a "John Doe Summons" on the crypto exchange Kraken, seeking identities of U.S. taxpayers who have used cryptocurrency, the Department of Justice said on Wednesday.

04/09/2021

About right.

02/04/2021

A new bill has been introduced in Congress that could make the first $10,200 of unemployment tax-free on the federal level for 2020. If it passes, it would have a serious impact on those people that collected unemployment. Because of this we strongly recommend those people that received unemployment last year to hold off on filing their 2020 tax returns until we hear more.

02/04/2021

The EIDL is serious business folks, for those who have a business.

A Springfield woman has been charged with fraud in connection to major disaster or emergency benefits available through the Small Business Administration (SBA). The indictment alleges that 41-year-old Amber L. Bolen submitted an application for an Economic Injury Disaster Loan back in July 2020. Off...