Spyglass by Chris Roach, under Creative Commons license, on Flickr

This tax season start has been busier than most. Here are some of the things I have been working on that have kept me from blogging:

• Congress passed the tax extenders later than they should have. Now NC is in the process of deciding which of the extenders they will adopt and which they will not adopt. This is causing a delay for some NC returns, especially those involving businesses.
• The 2014 individual returns are the first ones for reporting minimum essential care reporting under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare.
• IRS waited quite some time to provide relief to small employers (<50 employees) who had been reimbursing or paying individual health insurance premiums for their employees. Until this week, small businesses were facing a $100 per day per participant penalty for every day in 2014 when they paid or reimbursed for individual health premiums. The penalty could have been $36,500 per participant or, for example, $365,000 for a small business with 10 covered employees. We now have Notice 2015-17 (downloads as PDF) from IRS waiving the penalty for 2014 and through June 30, 2015. Small businesses either need to switch to group plans or just stop paying for individual health insurance for employees. One employee businesses are exempt from this rule. NC requires insurance companies offering group health plans in NC to offer them to all employers.
• Last August, IRS finished issuing their long awaited repair and capitalization rules for trade and business assets, including rental properties. Most businesses and landlords, even small ones, were going to go through an arduous process of examining their repairs, supplies and capital/depreciable assets since they started business in order to change to the new rules. Yes, retroactive changes to the rules. You have to love it (not really). Some of the rules came out just last month. I read through about 600 pages of rules, making notes and worksheets to get ready. On February 13, 2015, IRS released Rev. Proc. 2015-20 (downloads as PDF) exempting small taxpayers from most of the historical work. Small taxpayers still have to follow the new rules, they just do not have to go back beyond 1/1/2014 if they do not want to do so. A small business is one averaging less than $10 million a year in revenue over the last three years or with less than $10 million in assets.
• And as all of the folks in our area know, the ice and snow this week has caused problems.

I expect to post more regularly from here on out. Please let me know in the comments if you want more information on the above subjects or have another topic you would like covered.