The Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department released guidance Wednesday on claiming deductions for expenses associated with Paycheck Protection Program loans that have been forgiven.
The guidance in Revenue Ruling 2021-02 also reverses previous guidance issued last year by the IRS and the Treasury when Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin fiercely opposed the ability to deduct expenses related to forgiveness of PPP loans. Industry groups, including the American Institute of CPAs, lobbied for the ability to write off such expenses, arguing it would help struggling businesses and was in line with congressional intent when the CARES Act was passed last year setting up the PPP loans as a way to get money quickly into the hands of desperate business owners. The latest coronavirus relief bill included a provision that allows the expenses to be deductible and revives the PPP with a fresh round of $284 billion in funding. It will allow expenses related to seeking forgiveness of the Small Business Administration-backed loans to be deducted by businesses that received the loans, so businesses will be able to engage accountants to help with the task of applying for PPP loan forgiveness.
Wednesday’s revenue ruling reflects some of the changes to the tax laws that were included in the COVID-related Tax Relief Act of 2020, which was enacted as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, signed into law on Dec. 27, 2020. The COVID-related Tax Relief Act of 2020 amended the CARES Act to specify that no deduction would be denied, no tax attribute would be reduced, and no basis increase would be denied by reason of the exclusion from gross income of the forgiveness of an eligible recipient’s covered loan. The change applies for tax years ending after March 27, 2020.
Fatemeh Khatibloo is a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Fatemeh serves B2C marketing professionals, with a focus on the shifting global consumer data ecosystem. She helps marketers navigate the complex connections between privacy, trust, and ethical data use, including the practices and vendors that can help them bridge the privacy/personalization paradox. Her seminal research on personal identity management (PIDM) describes how consumers will soon manage the sharing of their personal data with each other and with businesses. Her report "Adaptive Intelligence" further defines a framework for privacy-compliant data sharing between organizations to gain insight, reduce risk, and increase profitability.
Fatemeh focuses on privacy, identity, customer insights (CI) services, CI strategy, data monetization, data sharing, adaptive intelligence and consumer preference.
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Prior to joining Forrester, Fatemeh was principal of Times Two Marketing, where she built social and multichannel marketing programs designed to engage consumers, drive brand loyalty, and deliver relevant, actionable data to her clients. Prior experience at Binger Catalog Marketing, Abacus, and HagginGroup (now Epsilon) provided her with a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing multichannel organizations across a spectrum of channels, market verticals, and disciplines. She has also held multichannel marketing positions on the client side, with firms like The Flax Companies and The Sharper Image.
Fatemeh is a member of the International Associate of Privacy Professional (IAPP) and is a Certified Information Privacy Manager (CIPM). She has served as a judge for the Multichannel Merchant Awards and the ECHO Awards.
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Fatemeh studied journalism at The George Washington University.
Mr. Allburn is a 20+ year industry veteran and President/CEO of DataDelta, Inc. which provides CDI-MDM consulting and patent-pending, vendor-neutral match accuracy analysis software used to analyze & optimize the match accuracy of Data Quality, CDI & MDM vendor match engines including custom, in-house match engines. Mr. Allburn has held senior technical and strategic management positions in the fields of Database Marketing, Data Quality, CDI and MDM for industry leading companies such as Metromail / Experian, the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Firstlogic and Group 1 Software. During his career Mr. Allburn has been responsible for over 200 successful CDI projects in banking, telecom, catalog and other industries. He is an international speaker and instructor for CDI-MDM Workshops, a contributor to DM Review and other publications, and a recognized Expert Witness in the Data Quality and CDI-MDM industries.
Jim Kane is director at Information Services Group, a leading global technology research and advisory firm.
The new revenue ruling thus obsoletes the old guidance from the IRS and the Treasury last year in Notice 2020-32 and Revenue Ruling 2020-27, which said the PPP loan forgiveness expenses couldn’t be deducted. The obsoleted guidance disallowed deductions for the payment of eligible expenses when the payments resulted (or could be expected to result) in forgiveness of a covered loan, but that has been changed now in the new guidance.
“This law uncategorically says that all expenses that were paid to meet the requirements of having the PPP loans forgiven are now deductible,” said Evan Morgan, director of tax services at Kaufman Rossin, which does tax and accounting work for many professional services clients, including law firms and doctors’ offices. “That’s a very big deal, particularly because they weren’t sure how to plan for this because professional services firms are a little bit different than normal entities in that they like to pay out all of their profits in the form of salaries prior to the end of the year.”
Howard Wagner, a partner in the Washington national tax practice at Crowe, believes the IRS and the Treasury took the correct position last year on nondeductibility of PPP loan forgiveness expenses, but acknowledged it was politically unpopular and didn’t survive. However, there may be some extra complexity in accounting for the reversal on financial statements. “The interesting thing on the PPP is because the Service had said they were nondeductible, you had to account for them in your provision as if they were nondeductible,” he said. “And now you have to go back and adjust your provision for the fact that they will be deductible. That impacts the tax rate and that impacts your financial statement tax provision.”
