House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will call on the deficit-reduction supercommittee to lay the foundation for an overhaul of the tax code in a speech to the Economic Club of Washington on Thursday. In an address timed as a response to President Obama’s jobs plan, Boehner plans to restate his opposition to tax increases either to pay for job-creation measures or to reduce the deficit, according to a preview circulated by his office. Yet the Speaker is expected to voice support for closing loopholes as part of broader tax reform, which could include eliminating tax breaks for oil companies and other industries. [OTM/The Hill]
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Brass Taxes Is Here for All You Warrior Poets and Other Nice People Who Hate TurboTax
- Caleb Newquist
- March 1, 2012
From the team that brought you a tax preparer in a diaper, comes the latest […]
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If All Corporations Are People, Should All People Be Corporations?
- Joe Kristan
- August 18, 2011
Ed. note: We’re happy to welcome tax sage Joe Kristan back to a regular posting spot in these pages. This is his first effort for us but insists that he won’t feel as though he’s truly returned until he’s trolled by Adrienne.
Megan McArdle ponders one of life’s great questions:
One of the main “real world” elements of the case for the corporate income tax, as I understand it, is that failure to impose such a tax would simply create an inviting method for evasion of individual income taxes.
The question I always have about this is: “Well, why don’t more people do this now?”
The biggest reason we don’t all corporations to dodge taxes is that it is unnecessary. People looking to nickel and dime their way to deductions long ago learned that all you need is a Schedule C to have a place to hide a deduction for your dog (“security expense”) or your girlfriend (“theft loss”). This idea is one of the foundations of the multi-level marketing industry, and was carried to spectacular lengths by a recently closed Iowa tax preparer. Megan senses the limits to this approach:
And the reason that it’s mostly pretty minor is that if you are obviously using a corporation to fund your lifestyle, then the IRS will descend upon you like a plague of deranged cicadas.
There’s something to that, even though the cicada analogy implies a nimbleness unlikely in the IRS; a herd of flesh-eating slugs would be more apt.
Still, a corporation does offer some tax-sheltering possibilities. One is that C corporations can normally use any fiscal year. By shuffling income between an individual and a corporation with a November tax year, you can, in theory, get 11 months deferral of income — at least until you are caught. Corporations have a 15% tax rate on their first $50,000 of taxable income, giving higher-bracket individuals possibilities of shifting income to a lower bracket. And C corporation shareholder-employees get some benefits unavailable elsewhere.
Yet these chiseling possibilities have serious limits. The fiscal year games require you to have real live business expenses. A Kansas City attorney who marketed such deals crashed against this requirement. Income of “personal service corporations” like law and accounting firms are taxed at a flat 35%, making them useless as a tax shelter. The personal holding company rules impose a special tax on corporations used to shelter income from investments.
Then there is what I call “friction” — the time and effort required to play the games necessary to juggle income between a corporation and an individual. You have to file a corporation tax return and keep corporate records. You have to compute both personal and corporate income accurately during the year to know how much income to juggle. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands, the effort may well be better spent actually making money.
Finally, C corporations have one overwhelming problem: the double-tax dilemma. Unlike S corporations, which report their income on shareholder tax returns, C corporations have their income taxed twice — first when earned, and again when distributed or recovered on a stock sale. There are games you can play to get it out as a deduction to the corporation, but these have their problems. Take cash out as compensation and you incur payroll taxes; take it out as rent and you actually need something you can lease to the corporation with a straight face. Distribute an appreciated asset to yourself and the corporation is taxed on the gain. The Bittker and Eustice tax treatise has a classic summary of the problem:
Decisions to embrace the corporate form of organization should be carefully considered, since a corporation is like a lobster pot: easy to enter, difficult to live in, and painful to get out of.
These problems could be solved by taxing individuals and corporations at the same rates and allowing a deduction for dividends paid. Unfortunately, the chances of that are as likely as the chances of your brother-in-law making good pre-tax money from his Amway operation.
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TurboTax Jockey Tim Geithner Says Tax Increases Won’t Hurt Small Businesses a Bit
- Joe Kristan
- August 5, 2010
The top individual tax rate is scheduled to jump to 39.6% on January 1, 2011. To those of us who do private business tax returns for a living, one effect is obvious: this will raise the tax rate on LLC and S corporation income.
But now Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says that all my small business clients thy rich law partners and CEOs (my emphasis):
Ninety-seven percent of small businesses in this country would not pay a penny more due to letting these upper-income tax rates expire.
Now some have argued that even if only a few percent of small business owners make over $250,000, these few make up a vast amount of supposedly small business income.
This argument apparently counts anyone who receives any type of partnership or business income as if they were a small business.
By this standard, every partner in a major law firm and every principal in a major financial institution would count as a separate small business. A CEO who has board fees or speech fees would also count as a small business owner under this overly broad definition.
Well yes, Timmy, “some” have argued for that “overly broad definition” — your friends who say 97% of small businesses won’t be affected by the scheduled tax increase. A 2009 report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is a source of the talking point that only a tiny fraction of businesses will be affected by the expiration of the tax increase. They define a small business 1040 as:
…any tax unit that receives any income (or loss) from a sole proprietorship, farm proprietorship, partnership, S corporation, or rental income.
So while a CEO who has board fees will count as a separate small business — as will President Obama, for that matter — so will every taxpayer that has a schedule C, schedule E or Schedule F. Your office Mary Kay girl or Shacklee dealer counts as a small business. Everybody who moonlights and reports their income is a small business. Everybody who rents out a duplex or vacation home counts, as does every taxpayer who holds, even briefly, an interest in a publicly-traded oil and gas partnership.
So how much small business economic activity will be hit by the increase in the top rate? A lot more than 3%. The center-left Tax Policy Center estimates that 44.3% of taxable income of these “small businesses” will be hit with next year’s scheduled tax increase (hat tip: Howard Gleckman). That seems low, if anything, based on what I see in practice.
It’s the successful, growing and profitable S corporations and partnerships that push their owners into the top tax brackets. Growing businesses typically distribute only enough income to owners to cover taxes — either by inclination or by agreements with lenders. Their remaining earnings go into growing the business or paying off the bank. If you increase their taxes, it either reduces growth and hiring or their ability to service their debt — neither of which does much for the economy.
When Tim Geithner says that the only people who will get hit by his tax increase are rich lawyers and director fee millionaires, it may tell us something about his social world. It tells us nothing about how the tax increase will hit business owners.