What a weird, weird tax here, man, I don't even know what's going on. Let's talk to somebody smart about this. It's Armstrong and Getty extra large because four hours, simply enough, this is Armstrong and Getty extra large. So two years in a row, because of the pandemic, the government said, nah, tax days, not April fifteenth. We're putting off this year. They put it off till what is it is? It May fifty fifteen falls on a weekend, so May seventeenth, I believe, is the official deadline. But let's delve into that question much more with longtime friend of the Armstrong and Getty show, tax attorney a cp A Stephen Moscow. It's Stephen. How are you, sir? Great and happy because you know how much I love talking about tax and thanks so much inviting me. Sure, you're a man who loves what he does, which is a great What do you think is going to be the biggest like, I don't know, mistake or or a problem that people run into with not so much the moving of the tax date, but just this whole crazy year that was good. Remant is giving away so much that my biggest concern for people is they're going to miss out on all types of benefit because most of the things you have to ask for him to get them would be a crying change. Well, I need to pay attention. I got pencil in hand. What what what can I get? Well, all kinds of things. First of all, a lot of people have said, hey, they didn't get their rebate money. What's going on? No problem, you can claim it on your tax return on the ten forty line thirty. You go ahead and claim what you didn't get and that's how you get it back. And another thing is a lot of people will say, hey, when's my money coming? What's going on here? The I r S has a mobile app, it's i RS to Go. It's i r S the number to go, and you can check your refund status on that. You can all yeah really, and you can also get free tax preparation assistance. So basically in these laws there's something for every body. There. There's people that are lower income, people that are higher income, all kinds of things. And some common things we take a look at is like the required memium distribution out of pension plans, because if we don't do that, there's a big exercise penalty. However, the government raised the age from seventy and a half to seventy two, and then they said, you know what for just forget about it, so you don't have to go ahead and take the distribution in there will be no penalty. Then also with retirement plans, you can take out five thousand two help you with the expenses of having a baby or adopting a child, which I think is a beautiful thing. And another thing is you know, the government went ahead and waved the penalty for people under fifty nine and a half to take up to a hundred thousand dollars out of their accounts. This is terrific. There's no penalty. That's wonder. Yeah, I didn't know that. I mean, I'm not going to do it. But you can take up to a hundred grand out of your four own k without a penalty. Yes, however you have to go ahead and pay tax on it. But you have the option to go ahead and say, well wait a minute, instead of putting the whole hundred grand in my tax return, I only want to do one third. So I put one third, to have three years to put one third. And then it used to be to get the money back in sixty days. But now they gave you three years to get the money back, and if you put the money back within three years, no tax, So you'd have to found the menu return get your money back. You'd use for for that. Also, if you had to make repayments on a retirement plan, they let you delay it for you don't have to do that. You know, I was gonna put the whole hundred grand on doge coin, so I should have plenty of money to pay the government back. Are you planning on you and paying for that with your next space flight? Yes, that's what they're doing now to make up for what he said on Starry Night Love. So a lot of people worked from home through all, like almost the entire year, and so their bedroom was their office and there all are there things that they can do, like home office deductions and stuff that they don't normally do. Most people don't qualify for home office. However, there's a provision the tax law where if your employer gives you money to go ahead and facilitate setting up that set up, the employer still gets the tax deduction, but it's not income to you. So what you should do is talk to the employer and say, look, you know, here's what I spent, and you should go ahead and correct my W two. And everybody's better off because the employer still gets a tax deduction, but the employee doesn't report his income, which is better than deducting it. But so merely sitting at a desk in my bedroom, even though I worked there every single day and that's how I made my living with my laptop, that's not good enough to call that a home office. Huh. You'd have to qualify for home office. So the first thing is when you said in bedroom with home office, there's a different rule. You have to use the portion of the house exclusively for business. Almost anything else there like a car. If you used for business, you can present deduction. If you used your your home office for an office and one for a bedroom, you get zero. That's that's one of the problems. Another, Wow, that's interesting. See it's got to have a special room. And you know, I don't know how the uncle Jim comes over and stays the night you're dead, or if I practice my guitar in there on the weekends. It doesn't have to be a special room, but it has to be exclusively used for the business. And there's another problem if you do it, if you go ahead and take home office and some people qualify for it, you convert a portion of your house from principal residents to business property, and then when you sell it, you don't get the forgiveness benefits. So that's why I tell clients, if you're going to do that, I think two plus that's a very high audit area. So there's a lot of things involved. Again, I'm not saying not do it, but if you qualify, think about that changing that portion of your home. That's why you might want to talk to the employer a first. And having switched that portion and not taxable, why that seems crazy to me, especially you know, given the modern circumstance. But uh, consulting crazy. There's a whole internal revenue code. I'll give you crazy. Yeah, yeah, I know it. So what are they cracking down on, especially you mentioned the home office thing is an audit cart. Yeah. And maybe with that question, where are we because you've talked to us over the years about how they the pendulum swings back and forth from like you know, auditing people. Are we in a we're going after people hard period? And then and and yes, or no, And then what are they cracking down on? Like Joe said, well, number one, you see that the spirit has changed because as far as the I R S is concerned for people, codes over back to business. They went back to their grabbing your passports, you don't pay your taxes, and with crypto, that's their big, big focus. Now they're looking at crypto and we've talked to on the show about their operation Hidden Treasure. They're going after people's civilian criminally, and they've got a lot of information when they issued the summons the coin base and there's a lot of information they get with the blockchain, and a lot of people think, oh, crypto is secret, it's not. There's good records and the I R S has them and they've gone them. And then it's a question of we'll wait a minute, houses taxes, it short term or long term capital gain? Are you using the foreign exchange? Oh you are? Then you have the foreign rules, the f bars that we've talked about, the other foreign supporting. So I don't have crypto, but I'm interested in this. So if I invested a thousand dollars in doage coin, you know, six months ago, and it's now worth four dollars. Do I have to take it out of and turn it into what I call real money, um be to get taxed? Or if does just does just that increase in the imaginary world of crypto, is that enough to have to pay taxes on it? Just the imaginary increased is not taxable. But what a lot of people miss is you go ahead and you go to the grocery store and you say, you know what, I think they accept crypto here, and I'm gonna pay for it the minute you use the coin. Then they say, uh huh, you have a taxable transaction. Then it says a short term? Is it long term? Is it ordinary income? And you get into all that wow wow, not to mention, did you convert it from something else? And then you know, did you do mining? Did you do an air drop, as hard fork, soft forks, all all kinds of stuff. They you add the complexity of the tax code to my knowledge of crypto and fast yeah, yeah, Stephen, You've always been a great defender of small business people. You always have always have good advice for for those with a few employees. What are you seeing a lot of now? What should they be aware of or what should did they be seeking. Well, one of the things is you should go ahead and look at the employee Retention credit because with this, for if you otherwise qualify and the government is giving you five thousand dollars per year per employee, but for one day up to it from five grand to twenty eight thousand dollars per employee. So for example, if you had ten employees, the government would give you two hundred and eighty thousand dollars. And you say, well, wait a minute, for the payroll taxes, I've already paid in. What do I have to do? I have to file an amended return of ninety But they're they're even doing better than that. They're saying, well, rather than paying the money in and then getting a check back, there's another form. You can use it form and with the say, you know, I r S. Let's make up a number. You know, I'm do a hundred grand here with my employee Retention credit and I would normally have to write you a check here for thirty. So I'm just going to go ahead and write you a check for zero, and you write v a check for seventy and one of the things we've done so this is terrific how do I qualify in our firm? We created a free work paper and this can tell you are you going to qualify for this or not? And because you were so kind in writing me on your podcast, if any of your listeners are interested, we'll just email that outcome and they can figure out, Hey, am I entiled toll? Is money or not? Cool? Hey Steven, you've been doing this a long time. Um, over the years you've been doing taxes. Where is the a graphic aggressiveness of the I R S right now? I mean when was the most aggressive time and where does this rank? That's changing because they go up and down and they've gotten a lot more aggressive because number one, they hired an additional two hundred criminal agents. They trained them, and what we're seeing now in the trenches a lot more criminal cases popping up. And President Biden just announced that he wants to give the I R S another eighty billion with a B for an enforcement. Now, when you have turn over eighty billion dollars, he's going to expect to see results. How to get results? What that means is the I R S is always complaining that there's so many people not complying with the taxile I just can't get all of them. Well, with the extra eighty billion in the extra criminal agents, there's an awful lot of people they just didn't have time for before they're going to go get now. So I expected to get very aggressive. That eighty billion was not the old days, kinder or gentleman. That because President Biden said basically he expects a ten percent return on the money. So he's looking to raise over eight hundred billion from the eighty billion he's given them. And if you're gonna get eight hundred billion dollars from taxpayers, that's going to be a lot of aggression. So Steven, last question for me anyway, and you touched on this a little bit, but who gets audited these days? The answer is it depends. The number one way kind of to get audited is through a computer program called if D I asked Discriminate income function, and that takes sixty six different categories and they look at things. But to give you an idea, as you go up in income, you increase your chances of being audited. Ironically, if you have a real small income, that increases your chance of being audited too, because the come and says, hey, you must be a part of the cash underground economy. Another thing that they do is they say, well, how do your deductions compare to the overall deductions for the country. The more you austray, the more they're interested in you. Then who do you do business with? And if they're being audited, they might audit you. Another one is if the person that prepares your tax return is in the problem preparer's program, where the others thinks, hey, that firm or that person is preparing bad tax returns, they audit you just because that preparer did you return. So there's lots of ways to get audited. But it's interesting. So you you don't really want to do business with people that you think might be the kind of people to get audited, because then you get audited. Interesting. Yeah, so well, Stephen, if people want that. The one thing you refer to or more information. I believe the website is Moscow it's l LP dot com. Is that correct? Yes, Moscow it's LLLP dot com. Or you can call us at eight tax deal. That's eight eight eight t a x d E a L eight eight tax deal. And what I would say is we have barely barely barely scratched the surface of so many things. The governments just given away the money as a little teaser. There's a vehicle you can buy now if the government'll give you up to forty dollars credit for it. There's an investment that you can make that the government will give you a thirty credit on it. They're giving you back your money, not to mention employing certain people like veterans, they'll give you back a credit. The deduction for restaurants now used to be fifty now, and so you get deduction. There's just it goes on and on and on and on. You know, if you limited me to just fifteen hours, I'd still have to Well. I memorized the phone number years ago because I assumed Steven, I'll be calling you from jail at some point in my life. One triple a tax deal. Steven Moscotz, thanks for your time today, my pleasure. Thanks, thanks extra large

What a weird, weird tax here, man, I don't even know what's going on. Let's talk to somebody smart about this. It's Armstrong and Getty extra large because four hours, simply enough, this is Armstrong and Getty extra large. So two years in a row, because of the pandemic, the government said, nah, tax days, not April fifteenth. We're putting off this year. They put it off till what is it is? It May fifty fifteen falls on a weekend, so May seventeenth, I believe, is the official deadline. But let's delve into that question much more with longtime friend of the Armstrong and Getty show, tax attorney a cp A Stephen Moscow. It's Stephen. How are you, sir? Great and happy because you know how much I love talking about tax and thanks so much inviting me. Sure, you're a man who loves what he does, which is a great What do you think is going to be the biggest like, I don't know, mistake or or a problem that people run into with not so much the moving of the tax date, but just this whole crazy year that was good. Remant is giving away so much that my biggest concern for people is they're going to miss out on all types of benefit because most of the things you have to ask for him to get them would be a crying change. Well, I need to pay attention. I got pencil in hand. What what what can I get? Well, all kinds of things. First of all, a lot of people have said, hey, they didn't get their rebate money. What's going on? No problem, you can claim it on your tax return on the ten forty line thirty. You go ahead and claim what you didn't get and that's how you get it back. And another thing is a lot of people will say, hey, when's my money coming? What's going on here? The I r S has a mobile app, it's i RS to Go. It's i r S the number to go, and you can check your refund status on that. You can all yeah really, and you can also get free tax preparation assistance. So basically in these laws there's something for every body. There. There's people that are lower income, people that are higher income, all kinds of things. And some common things we take a look at is like the required memium distribution out of pension plans, because if we don't do that, there's a big exercise penalty. However, the government raised the age from seventy and a half to seventy two, and then they said, you know what for just forget about it, so you don't have to go ahead and take the distribution in there will be no penalty. Then also with retirement plans, you can take out five thousand two help you with the expenses of having a baby or adopting a child, which I think is a beautiful thing. And another thing is you know, the government went ahead and waved the penalty for people under fifty nine and a half to take up to a hundred thousand dollars out of their accounts. This is terrific. There's no penalty. That's wonder. Yeah, I didn't know that. I mean, I'm not going to do it. But you can take up to a hundred grand out of your four own k without a penalty. Yes, however you have to go ahead and pay tax on it. But you have the option to go ahead and say, well wait a minute, instead of putting the whole hundred grand in my tax return, I only want to do one third. So I put one third, to have three years to put one third. And then it used to be to get the money back in sixty days. But now they gave you three years to get the money back, and if you put the money back within three years, no tax, So you'd have to found the menu return get your money back. You'd use for for that. Also, if you had to make repayments on a retirement plan, they let you delay it for you don't have to do that. You know, I was gonna put the whole hundred grand on doge coin, so I should have plenty of money to pay the government back. Are you planning on you and paying for that with your next space flight? Yes, that's what they're doing now to make up for what he said on Starry Night Love. So a lot of people worked from home through all, like almost the entire year, and so their bedroom was their office and there all are there things that they can do, like home office deductions and stuff that they don't normally do. Most people don't qualify for home office. However, there's a provision the tax law where if your employer gives you money to go ahead and facilitate setting up that set up, the employer still gets the tax deduction, but it's not income to you. So what you should do is talk to the employer and say, look, you know, here's what I spent, and you should go ahead and correct my W two. And everybody's better off because the employer still gets a tax deduction, but the employee doesn't report his income, which is better than deducting it. But so merely sitting at a desk in my bedroom, even though I worked there every single day and that's how I made my living with my laptop, that's not good enough to call that a home office. Huh. You'd have to qualify for home office. So the first thing is when you said in bedroom with home office, there's a different rule. You have to use the portion of the house exclusively for business. Almost anything else there like a car. If you used for business, you can present deduction. If you used your your home office for an office and one for a bedroom, you get zero. That's that's one of the problems. Another, Wow, that's interesting. See it's got to have a special room. And you know, I don't know how the uncle Jim comes over and stays the night you're dead, or if I practice my guitar in there on the weekends. It doesn't have to be a special room, but it has to be exclusively used for the business. And there's another problem if you do it, if you go ahead and take home office and some people qualify for it, you convert a portion of your house from principal residents to business property, and then when you sell it, you don't get the forgiveness benefits. So that's why I tell clients, if you're going to do that, I think two plus that's a very high audit area. So there's a lot of things involved. Again, I'm not saying not do it, but if you qualify, think about that changing that portion of your home. That's why you might want to talk to the employer a first. And having switched that portion and not taxable, why that seems crazy to me, especially you know, given the modern circumstance. But uh, consulting crazy. There's a whole internal revenue code. I'll give you crazy. Yeah, yeah, I know it. So what are they cracking down on, especially you mentioned the home office thing is an audit cart. Yeah. And maybe with that question, where are we because you've talked to us over the years about how they the pendulum swings back and forth from like you know, auditing people. Are we in a we're going after people hard period? And then and and yes, or no, And then what are they cracking down on? Like Joe said, well, number one, you see that the spirit has changed because as far as the I R S is concerned for people, codes over back to business. They went back to their grabbing your passports, you don't pay your taxes, and with crypto, that's their big, big focus. Now they're looking at crypto and we've talked to on the show about their operation Hidden Treasure. They're going after people's civilian criminally, and they've got a lot of information when they issued the summons the coin base and there's a lot of information they get with the blockchain, and a lot of people think, oh, crypto is secret, it's not. There's good records and the I R S has them and they've gone them. And then it's a question of we'll wait a minute, houses taxes, it short term or long term capital gain? Are you using the foreign exchange? Oh you are? Then you have the foreign rules, the f bars that we've talked about, the other foreign supporting. So I don't have crypto, but I'm interested in this. So if I invested a thousand dollars in doage coin, you know, six months ago, and it's now worth four dollars. Do I have to take it out of and turn it into what I call real money, um be to get taxed? Or if does just does just that increase in the imaginary world of crypto, is that enough to have to pay taxes on it? Just the imaginary increased is not taxable. But what a lot of people miss is you go ahead and you go to the grocery store and you say, you know what, I think they accept crypto here, and I'm gonna pay for it the minute you use the coin. Then they say, uh huh, you have a taxable transaction. Then it says a short term? Is it long term? Is it ordinary income? And you get into all that wow wow, not to mention, did you convert it from something else? And then you know, did you do mining? Did you do an air drop, as hard fork, soft forks, all all kinds of stuff. They you add the complexity of the tax code to my knowledge of crypto and fast yeah, yeah, Stephen, You've always been a great defender of small business people. You always have always have good advice for for those with a few employees. What are you seeing a lot of now? What should they be aware of or what should did they be seeking. Well, one of the things is you should go ahead and look at the employee Retention credit because with this, for if you otherwise qualify and the government is giving you five thousand dollars per year per employee, but for one day up to it from five grand to twenty eight thousand dollars per employee. So for example, if you had ten employees, the government would give you two hundred and eighty thousand dollars. And you say, well, wait a minute, for the payroll taxes, I've already paid in. What do I have to do? I have to file an amended return of ninety But they're they're even doing better than that. They're saying, well, rather than paying the money in and then getting a check back, there's another form. You can use it form and with the say, you know, I r S. Let's make up a number. You know, I'm do a hundred grand here with my employee Retention credit and I would normally have to write you a check here for thirty. So I'm just going to go ahead and write you a check for zero, and you write v a check for seventy and one of the things we've done so this is terrific how do I qualify in our firm? We created a free work paper and this can tell you are you going to qualify for this or not? And because you were so kind in writing me on your podcast, if any of your listeners are interested, we'll just email that outcome and they can figure out, Hey, am I entiled toll? Is money or not? Cool? Hey Steven, you've been doing this a long time. Um, over the years you've been doing taxes. Where is the a graphic aggressiveness of the I R S right now? I mean when was the most aggressive time and where does this rank? That's changing because they go up and down and they've gotten a lot more aggressive because number one, they hired an additional two hundred criminal agents. They trained them, and what we're seeing now in the trenches a lot more criminal cases popping up. And President Biden just announced that he wants to give the I R S another eighty billion with a B for an enforcement. Now, when you have turn over eighty billion dollars, he's going to expect to see results. How to get results? What that means is the I R S is always complaining that there's so many people not complying with the taxile I just can't get all of them. Well, with the extra eighty billion in the extra criminal agents, there's an awful lot of people they just didn't have time for before they're going to go get now. So I expected to get very aggressive. That eighty billion was not the old days, kinder or gentleman. That because President Biden said basically he expects a ten percent return on the money. So he's looking to raise over eight hundred billion from the eighty billion he's given them. And if you're gonna get eight hundred billion dollars from taxpayers, that's going to be a lot of aggression. So Steven, last question for me anyway, and you touched on this a little bit, but who gets audited these days? The answer is it depends. The number one way kind of to get audited is through a computer program called if D I asked Discriminate income function, and that takes sixty six different categories and they look at things. But to give you an idea, as you go up in income, you increase your chances of being audited. Ironically, if you have a real small income, that increases your chance of being audited too, because the come and says, hey, you must be a part of the cash underground economy. Another thing that they do is they say, well, how do your deductions compare to the overall deductions for the country. The more you austray, the more they're interested in you. Then who do you do business with? And if they're being audited, they might audit you. Another one is if the person that prepares your tax return is in the problem preparer's program, where the others thinks, hey, that firm or that person is preparing bad tax returns, they audit you just because that preparer did you return. So there's lots of ways to get audited. But it's interesting. So you you don't really want to do business with people that you think might be the kind of people to get audited, because then you get audited. Interesting. Yeah, so well, Stephen, if people want that. The one thing you refer to or more information. I believe the website is Moscow it's l LP dot com. Is that correct? Yes, Moscow it's LLLP dot com. Or you can call us at eight tax deal. That's eight eight eight t a x d E a L eight eight tax deal. And what I would say is we have barely barely barely scratched the surface of so many things. The governments just given away the money as a little teaser. There's a vehicle you can buy now if the government'll give you up to forty dollars credit for it. There's an investment that you can make that the government will give you a thirty credit on it. They're giving you back your money, not to mention employing certain people like veterans, they'll give you back a credit. The deduction for restaurants now used to be fifty now, and so you get deduction. There's just it goes on and on and on and on. You know, if you limited me to just fifteen hours, I'd still have to Well. I memorized the phone number years ago because I assumed Steven, I'll be calling you from jail at some point in my life. One triple a tax deal. Steven Moscotz, thanks for your time today, my pleasure. Thanks, thanks extra large