BT Team

Navigating COVID-19 has been complicated for all businesses and particularly difficult for those in the restaurant industry, given inconsistent mask mandates, spike in Delta variant cases, questions surrounding requirements for employee and patron vaccinations, as well as labor and supply shortages. One silver lining, however, has been the Employee Retention Credit (ERC), but questions still remain about this tax incentive and its status as a COVID-19 government relief program.

The American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was signed into law by President Biden on March 11, 2021, coinciding with the one-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic. The legislation is the sixth federal relief package signed into law since the onset of the pandemic in the United States last year and addresses the continuing economic and health impacts of the pandemic.

Late Thursday, April 2, the Treasury Department released new guidelines from the Small Business Administration for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to assist small businesses to submit their loan applications in a timely basis. We are continuing to monitor developments and updates that affect your business and will provide you with alerts on a regular basis to ensure you are informed on how to respond to tax and regulation changes as they occur.

On Friday, March 20, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin tweeted that the April 15, 2020 tax filing deadline will be postponed until July 15. Later that evening the IRS issued Notice 2020-18, making Mnuchin’s announcement official. Notice 2020-18 supersedes Notice 2020-17 which was issued on March 18. The new notice affirms that the IRS will automatically treat July 15 as the new deadline for filing federal income tax returns and making federal income tax payments for all taxpayers, including individuals, corporations trusts and estates.

In response to the ongoing coronavirus public health crisis, the federal government has taken unprecedented steps to provide economic relief to individuals and businesses. Since the beginning of March, Congress has approved $8 billion in emergency funding and passed the Families First Coronavirus Response Act to help combat the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. The third and most impactful phase of this relief is the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (the “CARES Act”), a momentous $2 trillion infusion into the economy which was signed into law on March 27th.

The third annual Georgia Construction Outlook Survey indicates that labor shortages and reliability from sub-contractors continues to be a looming concern for 83 percent of the state’s privately-held construction companies. The survey was conducted by Bennett Thrasher, one of the country’s largest full-service public accounting and consulting firms, in collaboration with Kennesaw State University’s Department of Construction Management.

Private, protected communication is the oxygen for the transfer of sensitive information in today’s environment. Unsecure communication makes us all vulnerable. It is essential that you understand possible weak points so that we all have the most robust, confidentially protected conduit for correspondence.

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced Monday, January 7, 2019, that the IRS will pay tax refunds during the shutdown.  This is a change from the previous policy announcement.

In last summer’s landmark decision of South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. (“Wayfair”), the US Supreme Court upheld South Dakota’s economic nexus law, which requires companies to collect sales tax when their sales or number of transactions with that state exceed certain thresholds.