The Internal Revenue Service released guidance this month to clarify the accounting treatment of payments under the Paycheck Protection Program and caused some consternation among some small businesses and tax experts. Many business owners who applied for loans under the PPP had the expectation the loans would be forgiven as long as their employees were paid for eight weeks, and the businesses would be able to write off their expenses as they traditionally have been able to do. The guidance puts this in doubt.
Notice 2020-32 clarifies that no deduction is allowed under the Internal Revenue Code for an expense that is otherwise deductible if the payment of the expense results in forgiveness of a covered loan under the CARES Act. The income associated with the forgiveness is excluded from gross income.
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.
Under section 1106(b) of the CARES Act, a recipient of a covered loan can receive forgiveness of indebtedness on the loan in an amount equal to the sum of payments made for the following expenses — payroll costs, any payment of interest on any covered mortgage obligation, any payment on any covered rent obligation and any covered utility payment — during the eight-week “covered period” beginning on the covered loan’s origination date.
The Paycheck Protection Program was designed to provide economic relief for businesses in the wake of COVID-19. If the requirements of section 1106(b) are met, PPP proceeds are excluded from taxable income and the corresponding PPP expenses that are essentially being reimbursed are not tax deductible despite being classified as ordinary expenses under section 162 of the Tax Code. Thus, PPP funding is a tax-exempt “wash” — PPP expenses are not tax deductible to the extent of tax-exempt PPP income. Since “PPP wages” are not currently tax deductible under the program, it will be interesting to see how businesses will be directed to prepare W-2s for 2020.
The CARES Act provides for the payment of fees from PPP funds for the processing of applications on a sliding scale beginning at a rate of 5 percent for loans up to $350,000. These fees have generally become earmarked for banks and other financial institutions despite the hope that many accounting and legal professionals would be eligible for these fees for services rendered in assisting clients to generate the needed paperwork throughout the application process. Banks are receiving tens of millions of dollars in fees from PPP funds to process loans for which they are not at risk. Banks are also collecting transfer fees from PPP funds when these proceeds are wired into business accounts.
The CARES Act legislation stimulus checks were processed based upon Form 1040 filings — essentially bypassing an application process. Similarly, perhaps PPP funding would be more efficiently disbursed if allocations were based upon prior Form 941 filings instead of assessing the same payroll information through a costly application process. Another relief measure would be to allow businesses to take tax deductions for PPP expenses despite the tax-exempt nature of PPP proceeds.
