Small businesses that manage to get their Paycheck Protection Program loans forgiven may find themselves losing valuable tax breaks, according to new guidance from the Internal Revenue Service.
Companies that qualify for loan forgiveness under legislation Congress approved won’t be able to deduct the wages or other businesses expenses they paid for using the loan, according to an IRS notice published Thursday.
“This treatment prevents a double tax benefit,” the agency said in the notice. “This conclusion is consistent with prior guidance of the IRS.”
The guidance clarifies a point of confusion in the $670 billion small business loan program to help businesses struggling as the coronavirus has brought the economy to a standstill. The law states 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.
Ashley Murphy, CFP®, AIF® is a principal and wealth strategist at Arete Wealth Strategists Australia, a fee-only financial planning and investment management firm for Australian/American expatriates around the United States and Australia. Ashley works with Australian and American expatriates to bring strategy, structure, clarity, confidence and compliance to their global financial lives and keep it that way. Ashley is a tri-citizen of the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. From 2014-2017, Ashley taught in the CFP programs at UC Berkeley Extension and Golden Gate University, he was a Knowledge Circle host for the International and Cross-Border Knowledge Circle with the Financial Planning Association (FPA) from 2017-2019 and is a regular conference speaker.
Andrew Kalotay is a leading authority on the valuation of taxable and municipal bonds. He is a prolific contributor to the literature on fixed income topics, such as bond refunding and the use and misuse of interest rate derivatives. His firm licenses fixed income valuation software and provides debt management advisory services. Before establishing Andrew Kalotay Associates in 1990, Dr. Kalotay was with Salomon Brothers. Prior to Wall Street, he was at Bell Laboratories and AT&T. On the academic side, he was the founding director of the graduate Financial Engineering program at Polytechnic University (now part of NYU). Dr. Kalotay holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. from Queen's University and a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, all in mathematics. He was inducted into the Fixed Income Analyst Society's "Hall of Fame" in 1997.
Guy Davidson, senior vice president, AllianceBernstein
The tax code permits companies to write off businesses expenses, such as wages, rent and transportation expenses, but generally doesn’t allow write-offs for tax-exempt income.
The ruling adds to the list of stumbling blocks facing businesses as they try to qualify for the Paycheck Protection Program loans.
Small businesses have reported technical issues in trying to apply for the funds, which restarted Monday after the first round of funding ran out after just 13 days.
The program, run by the Small Business Administration, provides funds to cover eight weeks of payroll costs and the loans are forgiven if the employers keep workers on the job or quickly rehire laid-off workers.