#32 | Tax Credits for Employers feat. Casey Hastem & Douglas Fruehling

Practical Tax with Steve Moskowitz

The shortage in the workforce; does it mean that people working remotely have an advantage? And does all of the bad news about San Francisco portend trouble ahead for business? Tax credits for employers. Episode Transcript Intro: Welcome to the Practical Tax podcast, with tax attorney Steve Moskowitz. The Practical Tax podcast is brought to you by Moskowitz, LLP, a tax law firm. Disclaimer: The information contained in this podcast is based upon information available as of date of recording and will not be updated for changes in law regulation. Any information is not to be considered tax advice or legal advice and does not form an attorney/client relationship. Further, this podcast may be construed as attorney advertising. You should see professional consultation for your individual tax and legal situation. Chip Franklin: Welcome to practical tax with tax attorney, Steve Moskowitz. I'm Chip Franklin. Steve, how are you today? Steve Moskowitz: Doing great. I'm always happy when I get to talk about taxes and when I say that people laugh, but you know I mean it, because we did radio together for so many years. Chip Franklin: One of the things obviously we're going to talk about today is unemployment. So I got a question for you to start things off. Do corporations like 10 99 employees or full time employees, what do they prefer? Steve Moskowitz: They're different. So what happens is, from the employer's point of view with a 1099, you only pay the amount, that's it. There's no benefits, there's no healthcare, vacations, et cetera, et cetera. With an employee then of course, usually there's the payroll taxes, the worker's comp and everything else that goes along with it and vacation, health benefits, pensions and so on and so forth. Some companies choose to have part-time workers because if somebody works for you less than a certain number of hours a week, you can not give them any benefits. So some companies do that. So it's a variety of factors and where a lot of businesses get in trouble because they don't want the hassle of all those payments and the expenses. So they misclassify employees as independent contractors. If you're doing that, if the IRS comes down, you're going to come down really hard. Because there's the unpaid taxes and social security and penalties and all that. But the IRS has this great voluntary program and what it is, if you otherwise qualify, basically you pay a tiny and I mean really tiny little pittance. All is forgiven. And then you switch people to employees, but you can't do that when you get caught. You have to do that before you get caught. Chip Franklin: Joining us right now is Casey Hastem she's director of recruiting at, weareVIP.com. Casey, great to have you here. Thanks. Casey Hastem: Hello. How are y'all today? Chip Franklin: Great. Casey, let's start with this question. Unemployment numbers are steady, but we just can't seem to get good people to fill positions in the workplace. Is that right? Casey Hastem: Yeah. And that's kind of what I do for a living is I help businesses find good people to join their team interestingly and I didn't realize we were officially in a recession because I'm not an economist. And so I pulled the jobs report that I think it just came out today, as a matter of fact, I don't know if you guys have seen this and I believe we exceeded expectations. We added almost 375,000 more jobs. Steve Moskowitz: Hmm. Good job. Casey Hastem: Yeah. And so even before, for every person out there looking for a job there were two jobs. Now there's like two and a quarter. So I think this is why you're seeing that unemployment go down. But I do want to say one of the trends that we've seen recently, because we work with companies from your small mom and pops to Fortune 500s. Those are our clients across all industries. This last week, we've started to see a little turn. You hear Tesla's starting to lay off. He said,