The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service announced the federal income tax filing due date for individuals for the 2020 tax year has been pushed to May 17.
The IRS will be providing formal guidance in the coming days. However, individual taxpayers do not need to file any forms or call the IRS to qualify for the new federal tax filing and payment deadline.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants recently asked Congress to extend the Paycheck Protection Program’s March 31 application deadline at least 60 days. Additionally, the AICPA also asked the IRS and the Department of the Treasury to extend the April 15 tax filing and payment deadline to June 15.
On March 18, the Internal Revenue Service provided clarification to special payment relief for individuals and businesses in response to the COVID-19 Outbreak.
For individual returns, income tax payment deadlines with a due date of April 15, 2020, are automatically extended until July 15, 2020, for up to $1 million of their 2019 tax due.
This payment relief applies to all individual returns, including self-employed individuals, and all entities other than C-Corporations, such as trusts or estates. The IRS will automatically provide this relief to taxpayers. Taxpayers do not need to file any additional forms or call the IRS to qualify for this relief.
While taxpayers still have to file their taxes by April 15, 2020, the deadline to pay taxes has been extended by 90 days until July 15, 2020.
During a March 17th press conference regarding the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced taxpayers will have an additional 90-days through July 15, 2020 to pay their taxes, penalty-free and interest-free.
He said individual taxpayers can defer up to $1 million of tax payments and corporations up to $10 million in tax payments.
One of the most common tax-related misconceptions is that filing a tax extension increases your risk of a tax audit.
This longstanding myth is simply not true, as filing a tax extension can statistically decrease the risk of an audit.
In addition to statistically decreasing the risk of an audit, there is also one other benefit to extending a tax return.
Many individuals may think the time to plan for tax season occurs during the tax season, which occurs after their tax year has ended.
Unfortunately, this is often too late to make any adjustments, which may have benefited the taxpayer.
Similarly, businesses can also fall into this line of thinking and fail to plan for tax season during their tax year.
It’s the 4th quarter. The holidays are right around the corner. The last thing you may want to think about is income taxes … but there are some compelling reasons why you should be thinking ahead.
Last year’s tax season saw the biggest change to the tax code in over 30 years. At the end of the tax season, we noted that one of the lessons learned was that individuals who engage us in tax planning early, on average, fared much better than those who did not. There are some very important reasons for this:
On Friday, March 22, 2019, the Treasury and IRS announced they have lowered the withholding underpayment penalty threshold to 80%. This means that taxpayers who were 80% or less under-withheld on their income tax withholding or quarterly tax payments may qualify for relief.
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