Change Management Means Tax Credits!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
With increasing pressure to cut costs, reduce non-value added activities, and improve quality, all companies must continuously change to stay competitive.
How do your clients drive changes through their companies? Change Management involves the planning and implementation of these changes. And change activities require a lot of your clients' resources, including time, facilities, technologies, and costs. These resources can be very expensive! The good news is that these expensive activities may also qualify for the Retraining Tax Credit.
We recently worked with a medical billing call center. They had a room full of employees with headsets and computers. After we talked with the operations executive and the training manager, we found that they were constantly changing their work flow and in-house customized software. Most changes required employee training as part of their change management initiatives, which resulted in a large Retraining Tax Credit $$ (for example, HIPAA 5010 work flow and software changes).
It was interesting that these changes did not materially increase the client's costs as indicated on their balance sheets, income statements or tax returns. Their CPA discovered this by asking their new client to give them a tour of their operations and asking a few questions. You will never know until you ask.
 |
DOR One-Day Seminar
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
We recently attended the annual Institute for Professionals in Taxation One-Day Georgia Tax Seminar. Here are some highlights: - Commissioner Doug MacGinnitie gave an overview of DOR's operations and issues. Interesting comments included "We measure wait times every day," and "Our job is NOT to maximize the state's revenue."
- Delays in processing tax returns (especially amended returns that include refunds such as tax credits) - due to the new $40M+ Integrated Tax System (ITS), the processing center relocation, their move to electronic filing, and new fraud detection methods. Note: so far this year, they have blocked over 162,000 returns for almost $100M of fraudulent refunds!
- New tax court - the Georgia Tax Tribunal will start in January 2013 to handle most state tax litigation. Where did they come up with that name?!
- Denied tax credits - many tax credits that require pre-approval are being denied due to missing documentation. For example, the Qualified Education Expense tax credit had over 6,000 returns with over $21M denied in 2011.
- Sales tax exemptions - new manufacturing and agricultural energy exemptions will start in 2013. Note: a qualified agricultural producer such as animal food manufacturing or poultry processing could qualify as either a manufacturer or agricultural business.
For a DOR summary of the tax legislation, click here.  |
About Us------------------------------------------------------------------------- Alpharesults has assembled a team with the specialized knowledge and approach required to obtain Georgia income tax credits. We are not a public accounting firm. Rather, our services complement those of public accounting firms and do not create conflicted loyalties, because our professionals do not perform attestation work or other external audit functions. We focus on small to medium-sized businesses and work exclusively in Georgia with a wide variety of in-state and out-of-state accounting firms. For more information on our services, follow this link. |
