Finance Tax Time

Does your incorporated business pay alternative minimum tax [”AMT]? If so, there is a 93% chance you have been overpaying your taxes by an average of $11,000 a year according to the Treasury Inspector General.

The Office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration was created in 1999 to oversee the IRS. One of the duties of the Treasury Inspector General is to study and report the efficiency of the tax payment system, particularly the accuracy of tax collection efforts. Many of the studies conducted by the office reveal starting results, particularly when it comes to businesses overpaying their taxes.

As part of this oversight, the Treasury Inspector General is reporting that many small business corporations are incorrectly paying AMT. The AMT was enacted in the late 1990s, but proved to be a huge burden on small businesses. The tax was confusing and the paperwork was incredibly complex. An amendment was subsequently added to give small business corporations relief from the AMT. Section 55(e) of the Internal Revenue Code now contains language exempting small business corporations from paying the AMT.

Small business corporations can claim an exemption from the AMT if gross revenues average $5 million or less for the initial three years of business. Thereafter, the business can continue to claim the exemption as long as revenues average $7.5 million or less of each subsequent three year period.

According to the Inspector General, companies that fail to claim an exemption to the AMT are overpaying taxes by an average of $11,638 each year. 93% of small business corporations qualify for the exemption. Since the IRS has no duty to notify taxpayers of overpayments, many small business corporations have no idea they are overpaying taxes and are due refunds.

All taxpayers have the right to file amended tax returns for the past three calendar years. Contact us now to find out if you failed to claim the exemption to the AMT and are due a refund for 2001, 2002 and 2003. If you failed to claim the AMT exemption, you may be due a refund totaling over $33,000.

Richard Chapo is CEO of http://www.businesstaxrecovery.com - Obtaining tax refunds for small businesses by finding overlooked tax deductions and credits through a free tax return review.

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Offshore financial centers are often used to run tax shelters. They have little or no taxes, and little or no financial regulations. For example, in the British Virgin Islands, corporations can be formed without the public disclosure of the names of the directors or officers of the corporation. Favorite offshore tax havens include colonial relics such as the Cayman Islands (British), the Dutch Antilles and Curacao (Netherlands). Other places are feudal relics like Monaco, Liechentenstein and Andorra in Europe, or other nominally independent small nations from the old British, Dutch and French Empires. Other places historically in the U.S. zone of influence are Panama and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The leading offshore center is the Cayman Islands, which is now the fifth largest banking center in the world, after New York, London, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

This is the backdrop on looking over legal papers from a court opinion on July 20th 2006. The judge in Texas District court ruled that certain technicalities of the case against the BLIPS tax shelter were wrong. This will have some effects in the case against 8 KPMG Accounting Firm former executives. KPMG itself has already pled guilty and paid a $456 million fine. One gets a feeling how these illegal tax shelter were carried out from these papers. BLIPS stands for Bond Linked Issue Premium Structure. It created a financial structure to make the capital gains tax deductions, through a capital loss. However, this “loss” had been paid at the beginning of the deal as the “premium”, hence the “BLIPS”.

The mechanism was as follows: Two companies in the Isle of Man (UK), St. Croix and another investment firm “Rogue” each borrowed $41.7 million from National Westminster Bank. The loans were for 7 years at fixed interest rates. The loans paid Interest Only, until a balloon payment at the end of the 7 years. St. Croix and Rogue agreed to pay high interest rates of 17.97%, in exchange for a $25 million payment to them from Nat West at the time the loans originated. So St. Croix and Rogue, received at the beginning of the loans a total of $66.7 million. Then the $66.7 million plus $1.5 million from each was put in an interest bearing loan at Nat West.

In addition, St. Croix and Rogue agreed to pay $25 million to NatWest, if they paid off the loan early, which is exactly what they did a couple of weeks later, May 25th, 2000.
To make it a little juicier, the two onshore companies behind the offshore companies had an interest swap deal with NatWest, where they received a floating interest rate, in exchange for the high fixed interest rate. Those under indictment argued that the $25 million that they received upfront was a liability or not. It was money they received, but it was not actually “loaned” to them. Plaintiffs argued that it was not a liability under IRS section 762, because this money was never lent to them. The tax shelters aim to create an illusion of capital losses, and also interest payments, both of which are tax deductible.

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The IRS is heavily promoting electronic filing options. This promotion has run into problems with corporations because of complex regulations. The IRS is now moving to correct this problem.

IRS Simplifies Reporting Requirements for Corps and Shareholders

Corporate tax filings are legendary for their complexity, number of forms that must be filed and general burden they create. Large, publicly traded corporations make every effort to file the proper forms, but the burden is such that when all is said and done, one corporation reported it had to file the equivalent of three tax forms for every working hour of the year. For small corporations and shareholders, the burden is not much less.

Given this massive tax burden, the idea of a corporation filing electronic tax returns is laughable. The IRS has finally realized as much. In response, it is making an effort to simplify or do away with regulations. In fact, the service has changed over 20 different regulatory groups to massively simplify a variety of tax situations.

One area of simplification has to do with the transfer of interest in certain types of corporate share transfers. Known as a section 351 transfer, the regulations previously required both the corporation and shareholder to file up to 18 different information items. Yes, 18! To simplify this mess, the IRS is now requiring the filings only for individuals that own more than five percent of a publicly traded company or one percent of a private company. Those still required to file will now only have to provide very basic information. This is a vast improvement on the old system.

One of the big red tape problems for corporate and shareholder filings is a simple one. The IRS has historically required everything to be physically signed by certain shareholders. This was essentially a method for forcing shareholders to come forward regardless of the corporate planning being done. The IRS is now de-emphasizing the signature requirements and allowing the same forms to simply be filed electronically. It sounds like a small thing until you go through the experience of sending a form to 15 different shareholders around the country.

The effort of the IRS to simply corporate and shareholder filings should be applauded. It is a small step in dealing with a large problem.

Richard A. Chapo is with BusinessTaxRecovery.com - providing information on taxes. Visit us to get more tax help.

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