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.
Brett King is the author of Bank 4.0, the founder of Moven, the host of the world's #1 fintech podcast, "Breaking Banks," and Bank Think's 2012 Innovator of the Year.
Yiannis Gavrielides is the co-founder and CEO of Covve, helping professionals to grow and nurture their contact network. He actively supports entrepreneurship as a partner at Invelopment Partners.
Megan Smith's diverse career journey at SAP spans almost two decades, across multiple lines
of business: from instructional design and training to product management and, for the majority of time, in HR. She has been an HR Business Partner supporting global leaders across sales, engineering, marketing, and product support. In 2018, Megan spent six months conducting two major academic studies for SAP in partnership with Temple University: determining factors that drive innovation culture and discovering how creativity, stress, and engagement are impacted by working in the office vs at home.
Over the past five years, Megan has been deeply involved as an HR leader in SAP's acquired cloud businesses in North America, the Head of HR for SAP Canada, and in 2022 expanded her
responsibilities to assume the role of Head of HR for SAP North America. Some of Megan's focus as of late has been developing SAP's Flex Work guidelines, D&I tools to develop inclusive
leadership, managing retention in a competitive market, and leading the COVID-19 Vaccination
office entry policy.
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.