Alternative Minimum Tax

For once, the last minute add-ons into a Bill made sense! Or at least they did if you are a small business owner.

The AMT band-aid was extended for another year. I was just starting to gear up some AMT education through TaxLoopholes. If the band-aid had not been extended another 25 million taxpayers would have become subject to this tax. I’m glad the patch was extended through 12-31-08 (for 2008 tax year) but I do hope that they once and for all tackle the AMT issue.

With time running out before the Christmas break, Congress finally got down to business this morning and passed a revised bill to limit the impact of AMT on Americans next year.

It looks like tomorrow Congress will take another crack at resolving the AMT logjam. An “omnibus” spending bill got through the House this afternoon with the AMT patch attached, and was sent up to Senate to be voted upon tomorrow. It also has the Iraq funding that President Bush insisted upon as a condition of passing the bill when it reaches his desk. But will that be enough to finally get the patch done?

Looks like Congress is still making some efforts to clean up the impending AMT disaster. Yesterday the Senate approved a one-year AMT patch without offsets, stripping out all of the other measures from the original House bill (HR 3996) that were originally intended to provide the offsetting increase in tax revenue. The measure passed last night by an 88-5 margin.

In the transfer from the old Blog format to the new one, we lost our comments and some questions. At TaxLoopholes we don’t want to leave any question unanswered (Although often the answer is “It depends!”) Here are some of the comments we received during the transfer regarding AMT.

Looks like turkey has trumped taxes. On November 15th, Senate Democratic leaders were to try and pass the pending legislation with the AMT patch before recessing at midnight. Yet here we are, on November 16th, listening to a deafening silence from Washington.

The House Ways and Means passed an AMT patch to extend the provision from 2006 through the 2007 year-end. But, at what cost?

I see that Congress has promised the IRS that it will act on AMT before closing down for the holiday season.

AMT Strategy #1: First thing, find out if it’s going to be an issue for you. Don’t wait. Call your CPA today with your estimated income and expenses. And then ask your CPA what he is doing to prepare you for AMT.

They say that 2007 is the year of change, at least according to the Chinese calendar. I don’t know about you, but it’s been a year of big changes in my business life and with a teenager in the house, nothing seems to stay the same for very long in the house either. And now we have a brand change looming on the tax horizon. In this case, though, it’s not something new…it’s something old that should have gotten fixed, and didn’t.