DISCLAIMER: Any legal advice given in this article is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as legal advice.
Occasionally something reminds us that compliance with the Internal Revenue Service Code should be a priority. You know of someone going through a difficult tax audit, you hear that the IRS is authorized to hire 87,000 new agents, you’re aware of someone engaged in fraudulent activity at a scale large enough to make the news. It gives you a period of anxiety, and you keep track of your receipts with renewed diligence for a while. But you wonder, are there other things that I should be doing to help an audit of my company not be any worse than it needs to be?
To help mitigate those fears, we have compiled a list of common areas in which business often have an unclear understanding. This kind of information is like flour, it is valuable, but if you try to put too much down your throat at once, it quickly becomes unpalatable. In light of that, we’ll keep the list short.
Documentation
Transactions deducted as a business expense need documentation as proof. The most common source document is a receipt or an invoice. It can be the bane of a business owner's life to consistently get and retain source documents, but the percentage of transactions you have correct source documents for can be a big factor in the outcome of an audit. Online transactions are often the easiest to forget to get a receipt for, and depending on who the purchase is from, can also be the most difficult to get a receipt from. Collecting and scanning in receipts is a low level, tedious task, and in our experience it often works best if the owner can delegate that to someone else.
Complete Documentation
Source documents need to not only exist, but they need to meet a few basic requirements.
Who was paid
Date of transaction
Proof of payment.
Description of what was paid for
Sometimes, a combination of source documents is needed to meet the requirements. For example, you receive a bill to pay. It meets all the requirements except proof of payment. The check that pays that bill meets that requirement, so the canceled check and the bill together comprise the source document. As a business owner, you don’t need to go through the whole list, trying to remember whether a receipt or other document has all of those elements. The critical thing to remember is that a description of what was paid for is included. A receipt or statement that does not include that information is not an adequate source document.
If the “what was paid for” requirement is met, the normal processes of keeping correct, reconciled books will typically generate the source documents to fulfill the rest of the requirements.
Separation of Business and Personal
This separation is extremely important for a couple reasons.
If you have a relatively small business and freely mix personal and business accounts, the IRS may view your business as a hobby instead, and decide that none of your expenses are deductible business expenses. This is in spite of the fact that you have taken measures to establish what you consider a legitimate business.
The other is the potential effect on limiting liability in the case of an LLC. Often one of the primary goals of establishing an LLC is to limit your business’s liability to the business assets. The argument can be made that if you are interchangeably using personal and business credit cards, checking accounts etc. that there isn’t actually a separation between your business and personal assets, and you can end up not having the protection you intended.
A very occasional personal purchase on a card that is tracked through your business books, or a business expense being put on a personal card, is not likely to have this result, but regularly using a card for both is not a good idea.
Meal Expenses
Meals are very commonly written off as a business expense, but there are very specific rules about what meals can be written off. Like most tax compliance rules, it can be complicated, but here are some highlights to remember.
A meal needs to have a valid business purpose to be an expense. Just because you are “on duty” when you get a meal, does not mean that the meal itself is a business expense. The meal must be for the purpose of conducting business, i.e. talking to a current or potential customer about business, conducting safety meetings with employees, etc. As always, documentation is your friend. A simple note outlining the general nature of the meeting and who was there, included with a receipt, or a safety meeting sign in sheet including subject of meeting are examples of helpful documentation.
If an owner or employee is having a meal by themselves, it is not a business expense. There has to be business conducted at a meal for it to be an expense, and a conversation with yourself does not qualify.
The exception is if you are traveling, in which case a meal by yourself can be deductible. For it to be considered business travel, it must be overnight. Even if you are traveling outside of your local area, if you are not staying overnight, meals are generally not deductible.
Entertainment used to be treated much the same as meals, it had to have a valid business purpose to be an expense. Entertainment is no longer a deductible expense. Fishing trips, golf outings, and sport events are examples of entertainment which is no longer deductible.
The exception to the above rules about meals and entertainment, is that when an event is for all employees and is primarily social, like a holiday party or company outing, it is deductible. These are 100% deductible, instead of 50% deductible like normal meals, so the documentation should specify the nature of the event.
These are some of the most common things that may be misunderstood, but they are obviously a small portion of what needs your attention in tax compliance. If you sailed through that list and mentally checked all of them off as being compliant, good for you! If you cringed at each point, take heart! It takes a lot of intentional effort to keep things in order and we are privileged to be a small part of that effort in your business.
The Arrow Team
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