Month: April 2023

Deploy Your Enrolled Agent Continuing Education As a Restaurant Industry Expert

Every restaurant you enter represents an opportunity to expand your business as an enrolled agent. Owners of restaurants have plenty of tax issues that they’re seldom prepared to address. They need tax professionals with the highest level of expertise. That’s what the enrolled agent designation represents. You can start on the road to helping them by conveying that enrolled agents are the only tax practitioners specifically licensed by the IRS.

To demonstrate your particular competence for the restaurant industry, relay to prospective clients your knowledge about tip income. This is a common tax accounting headache for restaurant owners that you learn from your enrolled agent continuing education.

Employees who receive more than $20 per month in tips are required to report the total to their employers. This situation most often occurs in the restaurant industry, but is also applicable to other types of businesses. A restaurant owner must adjust income tax withholding on the wages of employees who report tips. In addition, an employer is responsible for withholding and remitting Social Security and Medicare taxes on the tip income of workers.

Any uncollected taxes on reported tip income are withheld from future paychecks. However, a worker can give money to an employer at any time during the year to cover required taxes. The employee’s W-2 indicates any Social Security and Medicare taxes for tip income that was not collected. If this happens, your tax CPE teaches you to make an adjustment on the employer’s quarterly payroll report for the uncollected amount. The worker is then liable for uncollected payroll taxes. But businesses are still responsible for the employer share of Social Security and Medicare taxes plus other taxes associated with payroll.

Information covered in your enrolled agent CPE allows you to help a restaurant owner with the payroll issues incurred from employee-reported tip income. Employers use Form 4137 to disclose the tip income reported by employees. A recent revision to this form requires the employer’s tax ID number. This permits the IRS to engage in collection of the employer part of Social Security and Medicare taxes on reported tip income.

You enrolled agent training is especially important when restaurant employees report total tip income that’s less than 8 percent of gross receipts for the business. This requires allocating the deficient amount among the W-2s of all employees. A system of reporting allocated tips is usually based upon each employee’s share of total hours or gross receipts.

Restaurants have a special requirement of reporting tips annually on Form 8027. One of these forms is required for each location where more than 10 people are employed working a total of more than 80 hours per day.

These big demands of restaurants related to payroll and tipping of employees are just right for enrolled agents to address. The business owners benefit and your tax practice grows from a focus on such high level use of your enrolled agent expertise.

IRS Circular 230 Disclosure

Pursuant to the requirements of the Internal Revenue Service Circular 230, we inform you that, to the extent any advice relating to a Federal tax issue is contained in this communication, including in any attachments, it was not written or intended to be used, and cannot be used, for the purpose of (a) avoiding any tax related penalties that may be imposed on you or any other person under the Internal Revenue Code, or (b) promoting, marketing or recommending to another person any transaction or matter addressed in this communication.…

Ethics Continuing Education: Protecting Patients From Harm

For professionals involved in the world of psychotherapy, ethics continuing education is vital to a thriving practice. Forgetting the codes that every therapist must adhere to is simply not an option for anyone who wants to continue to grow professionally. One mistake could lead to the loss of your license or a malpractice suit. There are clear lines when it comes to how patients should be treated and the ethical considerations that every therapist needs to adhere to. By furthering your learning in this area and keeping up with the latest in research and development, you can ensure that the line is never crossed.

As a matter of professional conduct, all psychologists will follow the APA’s guidelines for ethical considerations. As a professional, all ethics continuing education will at least touch upon the foundational base developed by the APA. These foundational aspects include striving for beneficence and nonmalfeasance in the treatment of patients, incorporating fidelity and responsibility into the therapy, integrity, a sense of justice, and an ongoing and unwavering respect for the rights of patients and other people. It is through further learning classes that a psychologist can understand what it meant by this code and how it applies to various situations that could arise in a practice.

Naturally any ethics continuing education class is going to have to address the issue of confidentiality, which is central to any therapist’s practice. Clearly, when a patient goes to see a psychologist, they expect that everything that is said will remain between themselves and their counselor. But this is an area many therapists struggle with. When there is a danger to the patient or another person, the therapist finds themselves in a tough position. The law provides for the breaking of confidentiality in those instances, but it can be difficult to determine when exactly that point has been reached. Many patients go to therapy feeling suicidal. Is the confidentiality pact already null and void? Where does it begin and end. These are the questions every therapist will have to address throughout their career.

As with any issues, ethics continuing education should enrich a professionals approach to their field and give them a wider base of knowledge from which to work. While required by certain states, even those therapists who are not required to seek the credits should do all they can to stay up on the latest news and research as it pertains to ethical considerations in their field.…