#tax-compliance
Stay compliant with tax regulations and filing requirements
A Texas federal court vacated FinCEN's Residential Real Estate Rule on March 19, 2026, eighteen days after it took effect, ending the mandatory reporting requirement for all-cash LLC and trust property purchases while FinCEN appeals to the Fifth Circuit.
US freelancers billing foreign clients must convert income to USD at the exchange rate on the day of receipt, pay self-employment tax regardless of the client's location, and may owe an FBAR filing if combined foreign-held balances (e.g. in Wise or Payoneer) exceed $10,000 at any point in the year.
Program-related investments let a private foundation count loans, equity stakes, or guarantees toward its mandatory 5% annual payout, then reclaim the capital as it's repaid, but PRIs to non-charitable recipients trigger IRS expenditure-responsibility rules with a 20% excise tax and personal manager penalties for noncompliance.
The OBBBA's one-time retroactive Section 174 election for 2022–2024 R&D amortization closed July 6, 2026, but the standard three-year R&D credit window and permanent 2025+ immediate expensing under Section 174A remain available to small businesses.
The IRS raised 2026 HSA limits to $4,400 self-only and $8,750 family (Revenue Procedure 2025-19). A small business owner's guide to the S-corp more-than-2% shareholder rules, the 35% comparability excise tax, cafeteria plan workarounds, and how to avoid excess-contribution penalties.
US iOS developers can currently run external purchase links at 0% Apple commission while courts settle a replacement rate. This guide covers the bookkeeping fallout — the merchant-of-record shift, sales tax nexus, reconciling two 1099s, and Apple's 15-day transaction reporting rule.
The IRS's February 2026 policy, IRM 10.24.1, formalizes how AI models — now running 126 active projects across six annual cycles — flag small business and self-employed returns for audit, requiring mandatory human review before any AI referral becomes an examination.
Brazil's MEI revenue cap of R$81,000 a year has been frozen since 2018. A bill sent to Congress in June 2026 would raise it to R$110,000 in 2027 and R$140,000 in 2028, and let microentrepreneurs hire two employees instead of one — a case study in how frozen tax thresholds quietly penalize small business growth.
Prepaid lessons are deferred revenue — track per student, pass the exclusive-use test for the home studio, expense instruments via Section 179/bonus, log mileage contemporaneously, and keep W-9s for the 1099-NEC threshold.
Subscription platforms report gross earnings on Form 1099-NEC even though they keep roughly 20% as a platform fee, and adult content businesses see chargeback rates of 3-5% — well above the 1% threshold that triggers card network monitoring — making separate bookkeeping for fees, taxes, and disputes essential from day one.
LLM-based receipt scanners read crumpled and faded receipts far better than template OCR, but when a field is ambiguous they can hallucinate a plausible wrong total instead of leaving it blank. What accuracy benchmarks actually show, the IRS's $75 receipt threshold and lodging exception, and a weekly review workflow that catches confident errors before they hit your books.
California's SB 122, signed June 29, 2026, extends sales and use tax (7.25% state rate plus local add-ons) to prewritten software and SaaS starting January 1, 2027. Custom software and cloud infrastructure like AWS stay exempt; sellers over 5 million dollars in digital receipts shift collection to purchasers. Here is what's taxable, how billing-address sourcing works, and a compliance checklist.
