Tax Preparation – 5 Small Business Issues For 2015

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With tax time round the corner, most small business owners are already fearful of having to face it again, let alone facing it coupled with the stressful particularities they need to address come 2015.

Given how tax laws are ever changing, it’d be no surprise if you too were confused while trying to comprehend the complex revisions. According to tax experts for small businesses, here are the top five issues you should be dealing with on an urgent basis.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA)

Healthcare’s been the number one issue to plague small business owners since 1986. Come 2015 and the ACA, both the cost and complications have increased at a time when you’d expect otherwise. Small business health insurance tax is the main concern right now in addition to the 30-hour workweek designation for full-time employees, the employer mandate, and the individual mandate. If you fail to provide the basic health insurance to your employees or even to report to the IRS regarding the coverage, you may be in for some serious tax penalties. For instance, if you run a business with more than 100 employees, then you have to guarantee health insurance for at least 70% of the staff employed on a full-time basis.


Tax Extenders

There are 50 tax breaks included in the proposed bill and according to one expert; you need to be prepared regarding whether your business has been exploiting any of these breaks. Your preparation must involve organizing all your records and bringing them up to date so that they are easy to access during the tax season, especially when you are considering ways to secure potential deductions. For that matter, accountability for everything from meals to the use of a personal vehicle is necessary. One solution to simplifying this record keeping is to use modern technologies; automating the process.

While breaks such as Section 179 that allows businesses to subtract the full price of qualifying software or equipment leased or purchased during the year; are ideal for small businesses owners; a lot of them were rushed into making purchases in the last two weeks of 2014 whereas a lot more missed out because they had no idea about it. And again, owners will have no idea until later during the year whether purchases made in 2015 would still be subject to it or not.

Online Sales

One of the changes anticipated for this is the Marketplace Fairness Act whereby the legislation is attempting to equal the odds among the brick-and-mortar stores and those involved in e-commerce. It hopes to achieve this by allowing states to collect and pay the state sales tax from online merchants who earn at least a million dollars every year.

Retirement

There are multiple developments under consideration or brought into effect on this one. Owners of small businesses who are considering or even offering a retirement plan currently would now have to take into consideration the myRA, the non-mandatory workplace savings program initiated by the U.S. Treasury this year. Other legislations too are about offering incentives for small businesses so that they’d begin providing for retirement plans as well.

Corporate Tax Rates

One of the key issues that small businesses would have to deal with is the corporate tax rate. A company that follows the structure of a corporation is required to pay a higher tax rate than a limited liability company or other business structures. Lowering the rates for them won’t be as beneficial in terms of tax advantages for the small businesses if there’s no change in personal tax rates.

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