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.
Rob Sobers is a senior director at cybersecurity firm Varonis. He has been writing and designing software for over 20 years and is co-author of the book “Lean Ruby the Hard Way,” which has been used by millions of students to learn the Ruby programming language. Prior to joining Varonis in 2011, Sobers held a variety of roles in engineering, design and professional services.
Carmen Carey is the chief operating officer at Unbabel. The firm's products eliminates language barriers between companies and their customers by combining bespoke neural machine translation (NMT), advanced automated quality estimation, and a global human network of tens of thousands of ‘Unbabelers’, who post-edit the automatic translations to professional quality.
Joseph Marques, CFP, is a senior financial planner at Woodward Financial Advisors in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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.