Blog

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all aspects of finances, including retirement savings. The CARES Act contains provisions affecting these plans that will remain in effect for 2020. They include the following: The act specifically aligned the due date for contributions to IRAs and retirement plans with the extended due date for individual tax returns. Accordingly,…

The CARES Act—a collection of pandemic-related provisions—has good news for small businesses struggling to stay afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. The act provides relief to US-based businesses with (1) 500 or fewer employees that are unable to pay their bills because of the coronavirus pandemic or (2) the standard number of employees established by the…

March 24, 2020 – President Trump has signed the Families First Coronavirus Act (HR 6201, the “Act”) intended to ease the economic consequences stemming from the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak by providing family and medical leave, and sick leave, to employees and providing tax credits to employers and the self-employed providing the leave. Here…

We have temporarily closed our physical office and in person client meetings will now be handled by phone and email. The R&A team continues to work diligently using secure remote technology and will continue to meet your needs and deadlines. If you are not already using your portal to securely transfer documents, we continue to…

Can you deduct medical and dental expenses? That’s a complicated question. To start with, your deductions must exceed 7.5 percent of your adjusted gross income. And they must fall into an IRS-approved category. Deductible medical expenses may include, but aren’t limited to, the following: Payments of fees to doctors, dentists, surgeons, chiropractors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and…

The IRS has updated some rules for deductible expenses, as guidance in areas that may have been murky as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). The rules being updated involve using optional standard mileage rates when figuring the deductible costs of operating an automobile for business, charitable, medical, or moving expense purposes, among…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tucson, AZ, February 6, 2020—R&A CPAs, one of Southern Arizona’s leading public accounting and business advisory firms, announced today that Laura Liewen, CPA, and Jed Lightcap, CPA, have been promoted to shareholder. Laura Liewen has more than twenty years of experience in public accounting. She specializes in income tax return preparation, compliance,…

The IRS can now assign eligible taxpayers an “IP PIN,” a six-digit code to help prevent the misuse of Social Security numbers on fraudulent federal income tax returns. As the IRS explains, this PIN helps the agency verify a taxpayer’s identity and accept his or her electronic or paper tax return. Not everyone can get…

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) made major changes that affect how individual taxpayers can claim deductions. For individual taxpayers, the biggest changes were (1) the increase in the standard deduction, which significantly raised the threshold for claiming itemized deductions; (2) the elimination of some itemized deductions (e.g., moving expenses) and the…