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Tax Blog/Blawg

Tax Talk Blog for Tax Pros

Welcome to TaxBlawg, a blog resource from Chamberlain Hrdlicka for news and analysis of current legal issues facing tax practitioners. Although blawg.com identifies nearly 1,400 active “blawgs,” including 20+ blawgs related to taxation and estate planning, the needs of tax professionals have received surprisingly little attention.

Tax practitioners have previously lacked a dedicated resource to call their own. For those intrepid souls, we offer TaxBlawg, a forum of tax talk for tax pros.

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  • Posts by Joshua A. Sutin
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    Joshua Sutin helps clients unravel complex legal and business issues related to employee benefit plans, tax-exempt organizations, and business tax planning. He counsels both businesses and not-for-profit organizations on the ...

The IRS wants you to be entertained – in a twisted sort of way. The deductibility of employer expenses around entertainment, amusement, recreation, or qualified transportation fringes has a long history that most people would not find very entertaining. Just when many of us thought we understood what an employer could or could not deduct under Internal Revenue Code Section 274, the Tax Jobs and Creations Act of 2017, made the entertainment’s plot change dramatically. The boring documentary suddenly became a bit of a horror picture.

With those caveats, if you read no further ...

Categories: Tax Legislation

As the nation responds to COVID-19 and a world pandemic, IRC §139 may be one more tool in an employer’s toolkit to help their employees with fighting this silent war.

Under the Internal Revenue Code (“IRC”) §139(a), “qualifying disaster relief payment" from an employer to an employee are excluded from gross income, the opposite of normal tax law. 

IRC §139 applies after the President of the United States declares a disaster. On March 13, 2020, President Trump made an emergency declaration under the Robert T. Stafford Act, evoking the protections of §139.

Importantly, an ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised several interesting issues for employers and employees under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This client alert will address the challenges employers are facing due to the pandemic and their effect on ACA compliance, as well as potential exposure to employer mandate penalties.

General overview of the ACA rules and ESRPs

The ACA added Section 4980H to the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), which applies to applicable large employers (ALEs). An employer is an ALE for a calendar year if, on average, it employed at least 50 full-time employees during the previous ...

Categories: COVID-19