tax advisor

Tax reform brings changes to fringe benefits that can affect an employer’s bottom line

The IRS reminds employers that several programs have been affected as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed last year. This includes changes to fringe benefits, which can affect an employer's bottom line and its employees' deductions.

Here’s information about some of these changes that will affect employers:

Entertainment Expenses & Deduction for Meals
The new law generally eliminated the deduction for any expenses related to activities generally considered entertainment, amusement or recreation.
 
However, under the new law, taxpayers can continue to deduct 50 percent of the cost of business meals if the taxpayer or an employee of the taxpayer is present, and the food or beverages are not considered lavish or extravagant. The meals may be provided to a current or potential business customer, client, consultant or similar business contact. Food and beverages that are purchased or consumed during entertainment events will not be considered entertainment if either of these apply:

  • they are purchased separately from the entertainment

  • the cost is stated separately from the entertainment on one or more bills, invoices or receipts

Qualified Transportation 
The new law also disallows deductions for expenses associated with qualified transportation fringe benefits or expenses incurred providing transportation for commuting. There is an exception when the transportation expenses are necessary for employee safety.

Bicycle Commuting Reimbursements 
Under the new law, employers can deduct qualified bicycle commuting reimbursements as a business expense. The new tax law suspends the exclusion of qualified bicycle commuting reimbursements from an employee’s income. This means that employers must now include these reimbursements in the employee’s wages.
  
Qualified Moving Expenses Reimbursements 
Employers must now include moving expense reimbursements in employees’ wages. The new tax law suspends the exclusion for qualified moving expense reimbursements.

There is one exception as members of the U.S. Armed Forces can still exclude qualified moving expense reimbursements from their income if they meet certain requirements.

Employee Achievement Award 
Special rules allow an employee to exclude achievement awards from their wages if the awards are tangible personal property. An employer also may deduct awards that are tangible personal property, subject to certain deduction limits. The new law clarifies the definition of tangible personal property.

At Zhong & Sanchez, we provide high-quality tax and financial reporting services to privately-held entities and small business owners. Our expertise ranges from income tax filing and accounting services to international compliance and financial analysis. Located in the Silicon Valley, you can reach us at 510-458-4451 or schedule your first consultation today at https://calendly.com/zhongsanchez

Source: IRS

Picture credt: Jaclyn Morgan, Foodable

The New Employer 401(k) Match: How Generous Is Your Boss?

Source: https://www.forbes.com/ 

Between the corporate tax cut and the tight labor market, more companies are moving to increase pay and benefits, including their contributions to retirement plans.  In a January survey, one out of four employers told Willis Towers Watson that they have increased their 401(k) match this year or plan to do so next year.

But there’s a catch: If you don’t pay attention and pick the right percentage of salary to save, you could miss out on getting the full increase in the match.

Under the most common match formula, an employer contributes $1 for every $1 the employee saves up to some percent of salary---say 6%. Under the next most common arrangement, the employer contributes 50 cents for every $1 the worker puts away, up to some percent.

In a typical match increase, the employer raises the percentage of salary they’ll match—say from 5% to 7%. But to get that increase you’d have to save at least 7% of your salary. It’s called “stretching” the match in retirement-speak. “As an employee, you’ve got to put more skin in the game,” says Rick Unser, a retirement plan consultant in Hermosa Beach, California, who says he sees employers starting to make employees stretch to contributing 8% or 10% in order to get the full match.

Robert Lawton, a retirement plan consultant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has seen some radical employers moving to a 25% match on 12%, meaning workers would need to contribute 12% of pay to get the maximum employer matching contribution of 3% of pay. “You get the employees to contribute more even though the employer is contributing the same amount,” Lawton says. Usually, the employer is contributing more, and the employee is contributing more as well.

The rule of thumb is you should save 15% of your salary (including any employer match) each year for 40 years. The problem is that many workers haven’t saved anywhere near that much in the beginning of their careers, some have been in and out of the workforce, and others have been in the gig economy, where they don’t have access to a workplace retirement plan, Lawton points out, noting that a lot of workers need to be saving more than 15% of pay.

That said, here are two ways employers are trying to get their employees to at least 15% of pay saved (employee and employer contributions combined). Honeywell recently announced that in April, for workers currently getting a 75% match on the first 8% of pay, the match will increase to 87.5% (for a maximum employer match of 7%, up from 6%). For workers currently getting a 37.5% match on the first 8% of pay, the match will increase to 43.75% (for a new maximum employer match of 3.5%, up from 3%).

At Visa, employees will have to start saving 5% of salary to get the new, increased employer match, which can bring them to the 15% goal. Today Visa matches 200% of employee contributions up to 3% of salary, for a maximum employer match of 6% of pay. The new Visa match, effective in late February, will be 200% of employee contributions up to 5% of salary, for a maximum employer match of 10% of pay. In a paternalistic move, Visa will be changing its default employee pre-tax contribution from 3% to 5%—for workers who contribute less than 5%.

What if you work for a company—or are considering a job switch to one—that has a match that’s less than $1 for $1 on 6% of pay? Check if there's a profit sharing plan or a pension plan, says Rob Austin, director of research at Alight Solutions. “If not, maybe you’re behind the competition,” he says.

When in doubt, consult a trustworthy CPA! Zhong and Sanchez is dedicated to provide high-quality tax and financial reporting services to privately-held entities and small business owners. Our expertise ranges from income tax filing and accounting services to international compliance and financial analysis. Located in the Silicon Valley, you can reach us at 510-458-4451 or schedule your first free consultation today at https://calendly.com/zhongsanchez

Picture credit: shutterstock

Contractors could benefit from new tax law

The new tax law is likely to accelerate a hotly disputed trend in the American economy by rewarding workers who sever formal relationships with their employers and become contractors.

Management consultants may soon strike out on their own, and stockbrokers may hang out their own shingle.

More cable repairmen and delivery drivers, some of whom find work through gig economy apps like Uber, may also be lured into contracting arrangements.

That’s because a provision in the tax law allows sole proprietors — along with owners of partnerships or other so-called pass-through entities — to deduct 20 percent of their revenue from their taxable income.

The tax savings, which could be around $15,000 per year for many affluent couples, may prove enticing to workers. “If you’re above the median but not at the very, very top, one would think you’d be thinking it through,” said David Kamin, a professor of tax law at New York University.

The provision may also turn out to be a boon for employers who are trying to reduce their payroll costs. Workers hired as contractors, who tend to be cheaper, may be less likely to complain about their status under the new tax law.

“Firms currently have a lot of incentives to turn workers into independent contractors,” said Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “This reinforces the current trends.”

But it could lead to an erosion of the protections that have long been a cornerstone of full-time work.

Formal employment, after all, provides more than just income. Unlike independent contractors, employees have access to unemployment insurance if they lose their jobs and workers’ compensation if they are injured at work. They are protected by workplace anti-discrimination laws and have a federally backed right to form a union.

Those protections do not generally apply to contractors. Nor do minimum-wage and overtime laws.

“What you’re losing is the safety nets for those workers,” said Catherine Ruckelshaus of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group.

Traditional full-time jobs also insulate workers against the peaks and troughs in the demand for their services. Consider, for instance, the erratic income of retail or fulfillment-center workers hired in the fall and let go after the holidays.

And because companies have internal pay scales, the lowest-paid employees tend to make more than they would on the open market.

“It used to be that companies like G.M. or the local bank or factory directly employed the janitor, the clerical worker,” Professor Katz said, noting that their pay would rise along with other employees’ when the company was doing well.

Unwinding employment relationships eliminates these benefits, increasing the volatility of workers’ incomes and magnifying pay disparities and inequality.

It’s difficult to say how many workers would choose to become contractors as a result of the new provision, which for couples frequently begins to phase out at a taxable income above $315,000. Mr. Kamin said joint filers who make close to $315,000 and could transform most of these earnings into business income would find it most compelling to make the change. (It could be more compelling still if one spouse’s employer offered the couple health insurance, which many employers provide even though they aren’t required to.)

On the other hand, many individuals fail to avail themselves of existing tax deductions, like the one that freelancers can take for their expenses, said Jamil Poonja of Stride Health, which helps self-employed workers buy health insurance. That may reflect the lack of access among lower-earning workers to sophisticated tax advice.

The tax benefit could also be offset in some cases by the need for contractors to pay both the employer and employee portion of the federal payroll tax.

Many employers are already pushing the boundaries of who they treat as employees and who they treat as independent contractors.

In theory, it is the nature of the job, and not the employer’s whim, that is supposed to determine the worker’s job status.

If a company exerts sufficient control over workers by setting their schedules or how much they charge customers, and if workers largely depend on the company for their livelihood, the law typically considers those workers to be employees.

True contractors are supposed to retain control over most aspects of their job and can typically generate income through entrepreneurial skill, and not just by working longer hours.

In practice, however, many companies classify workers who are clearly employees as contractors, because they are usually much cheaper to use. And many labor advocates say the new tax deduction will encourage more employers to go that route by giving them an additional carrot to dangle in front of workers.

“The risk presented by this provision is that employers can go to workers and say, ‘You know what, your taxes will go down, let me classify you as an independent contractor,’” said Seth Harris, a deputy labor secretary under President Barack Obama.

Anything that makes workers more likely to accept such an arrangement makes it harder to root out violations of the law. That is because the agencies responsible for policing misclassification — the Labor Department, the Internal Revenue Service, state labor and tax authorities — lack the resources to identify more than a fraction of the violations on their own.

“Your chances of finding a worker that’s been misclassified if that worker has not complained are worse than your chances of finding a leprechaun riding a unicorn,” Mr. Harris said.

David Weil, the administrator of the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division under Mr. Obama, believes the change will add fuel to a trend that has been several decades in the making.

During that time, as Mr. Weil documented in a book on the subject, “The Fissured Workplace,” employers have steadily pushed more work outside their organizations, paring the number of people they employ and engaging a rising number of contractors, temporary workers and freelancers.

The tax law will accelerate the shift, he said, because employers who are already keen to reorganize in this way will recognize that even fewer workers are likely to object as a result of the tax benefits.

The effect of the deduction could be especially big in industries where misclassification is already rampant.

Many small-time construction contractors hire full-time workers who should be classified as employees but are kept on as freelancers or paid under the table, said Kyle Makarios, political director for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America.

Mr. Makarios said the pass-through provision would encourage even more building contractors to misclassify workers, allowing them to reduce their labor costs and underbid contractors who play by the rules.

The practice by ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft of classifying drivers as independent contractors has long been criticized by labor advocates and plaintiffs’ lawyers. They argue that the companies control crucial features of the working relationship and hold most of the economic power.

Neil Bradley, senior vice president and chief policy officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said that gig-economy companies classify workers as contractors when it suits the needs of their business and that he did not expect that to change. He also said he did not expect firms with traditional business models to follow suit as a result of the new provision.

“I think the decision is going to be driven by the considerations” that lawyers cite, such as the amount of control a company exercises, he said, “not by this tax bill.”

But Mr. Weil was less sanguine.

“These kinds of approaches to making it easier to slide into independent contractor status reflect unequal bargaining power,” he said. “When you add to that an additional financial incentive, you’re just unwinding the whole system.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/31/business/economy/tax-work.html?WT.mc_id=SmartBriefs-Newsletter&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=smartbriefsnl