The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee said the Treasury Department “missed the mark” in new guidance that limits tax breaks for businesses that get their Paycheck Protection Program loans forgiven.
In a joint statement Thursday, Senate Finance Chairman Chuck Grassley and Democrat Ron Wyden said the Treasury is depriving some small businesses of much-needed economic relief by forcing them to choose between getting their PPP loans forgiven or claiming write-offs on expenses they covered with the loan money. The IRS published guidance on the issue Wednesday.
“Regrettably, Treasury has now doubled down on its position in new guidance that increases the tax burden on small businesses by accelerating their tax liability, all at a time when many businesses continue to struggle and some are again beginning to close,” Grassley and Wyden said.
The congressional reaction to the guidance puts additional pressure on the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service to allow taxpayers to claim the expense deductions. Grassley and Wyden encouraged the IRS to reverse its position.
The lawmakers said they are working to include language in year-end legislation clarifying that taxpayers qualify for expense deductions even if their loans are forgiven. That could be included in government spending legislation that Congress must pass by Dec. 11 before federal funding runs out.
Chris Moran, a tax attorney for law firm Venable LLP, said, “the IRS guidance seems to be inconsistent with congressional intent” in the CARES Act, which created PPP loans for businesses struggling from the pandemic. The law stated that the forgiven loan won’t be taxed, but didn’t specify whether companies could still write off the expenses they covered with that money.
Esther Shein is a longtime freelance business and tech writer based in the Boston area.
Thameem Khan is a principal solutions architect at Dell Boomi, a provider of cloud integration and workflow automation software.
Arjan Schütte is the founder and a managing partner of Core Innovation Capital, a leading venture capital fund investing in financial services companies that empower everyday Americans. Such investments include Oportun, Ripple, CoverHound, and TIO Networks. Arjan is a sought-after consumer finance expert and a passionate advocate for market-based financial inclusion. He blogs for Forbes, and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Economist, among others. He has spoken everywhere from SxSW to Stanford, from Money2020 to MIT. Arjan is a Senior Advisor to the Center for Financial Services Innovation, the nation’s leading authority on financial health, which he helped start in 2004. He currently sits on the boards of BankingUp, CoverHound (as observer), Ripple (as observer), SavvyMoney, TIO Networks, and Vouch. A number of Arjan’s investments have been successfully acquired, including AccountNow (by Green Dot), CircleLending (by Virgin Group), L2C (by TransUnion), and RentBureau (by Experian). Prior, Arjan spent a decade as an entrepreneur in several venture backed startups as a technology leader and general manager including Pierian Spring Software, Cognitive Concepts (acquired by Houghton Mifflin), Capella Learning (now NASDAQ: CPLA), and DoTheGood. Arjan earned his Master’s from the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as an Interval Research Fellow, and his Bachelor’s in Philosophy and Communication at Lewis & Clark College. He commutes between Los Angeles and San Francisco, when he’s not doting on his his wife and two young children.
Excluding the forgiven loan from tax “is essentially meaningless if the expenses funded by the loan are nondeductible,” Moran said.
Still, many taxpayers aren’t expecting to get permission to claim the deductions, from the IRS or Congress, in the short term.
“I think most of them are, at least for now, resigned” to not getting the write-offs, Joe Kristan, a partner at the accounting firm Eide Bailly LLP in Des Moines, Iowa. “They’d certainly like to be allowed by Congress to step in and allow their deductions, but they’re not counting on it.”