INTRODUCTION
Charitable organizations work hard to maintain exempt status. These organizations operate in a highly regulated landscape: In exchange for enjoying freedom from income taxes, they must comply with strict organizational and operational rules. Even before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (“TCJA”), adhering to these rules required constant oversight. The TCJA changes the rules, impacting both the operations and funding of these organizations.
On the operational side, we review below: Changes to the rules on unrelated business taxable income and employee fringe benefits, the new excise taxes imposed on executive compensation, and college and university endowments, and changes to substantiation requirements for certain donations.
On the funding side, we review below: How changes to the standard deduction (addressed in more detail in a prior blog post), cash contribution limits, deductions for payments to colleges and universities for the right to purchase athletic event tickets, and the estate tax may impact donors and charitable giving patterns.
INTRODUCTION
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (“TCJA”) creates the need for tax planning with respect to several major life-changing activities individuals may encounter, including marriage, divorce, home ownership, casualty losses, medical expenses and parenting. More specifically, the TCJA makes major changes to the existing framework of personal exemptions and itemized deductions, the child tax credit, the tax treatment of alimony and spousal maintenance payments made as a result of divorce, and the alternative minimum tax (“AMT”).
The primary focus of this blog post is the provisions of the TCJA that significantly impact families and individuals. Many of these provisions have been exhaustively reviewed by other commentators in the past several weeks. In those instances, our discussion is brief. Rather, we decided to place the bulk of our discussion on the less obvious provisions of the TCJA that may have significant impact on families and individuals.
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Larry J. Brant
Editor
Larry J. Brant is a Shareholder and the Chair of the Tax & Benefits practice group at Foster Garvey, a law firm based out of the Pacific Northwest, with offices in Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Washington, D.C.; New York, New York, Spokane, Washington; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Beijing, China. Mr. Brant is licensed to practice in Oregon and Washington. His practice focuses on tax, tax controversy and transactions. Mr. Brant is a past Chair of the Oregon State Bar Taxation Section. He was the long-term Chair of the Oregon Tax Institute, and is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Portland Tax Forum. Mr. Brant has served as an adjunct professor, teaching corporate taxation, at Northwestern School of Law, Lewis and Clark College. He is an Expert Contributor to Thomson Reuters Checkpoint Catalyst. Mr. Brant is a Fellow in the American College of Tax Counsel. He publishes articles on numerous income tax issues, including Taxation of S Corporations, Reasonable Compensation, Circular 230, Worker Classification, IRC § 1031 Exchanges, Choice of Entity, Entity Tax Classification, and State and Local Taxation. Mr. Brant is a frequent lecturer at local, regional and national tax and business conferences for CPAs and attorneys. He was the 2015 Recipient of the Oregon State Bar Tax Section Award of Merit.
