Tips to Reduce Your Current Income Taxes Next Year

Income taxes are a substantial burden for business owners and real estate investors. There are few actions which can reduce your current income taxes after December 31, 2006. This article summarizes four options for reducing your current federal income taxes during next year.

These include reducing revenue, increasing real estate depreciation, increasing expenses by conducting a fixed asset audit and increasing expenses by converting capital expenditures into operating expenses.

The basic process for calculating income taxes is simple:

~ Revenue - expenses = net income, or taxable income,

~ Taxable income x tax rate = income taxes

Two options for reducing income taxes are to reduce revenues or increase expenses. It is not possible to change the tax rate except through congressional action. It may be possible to reduce revenue for taxpayers on an accrual accounting system. Taxpayers may be able to increase expenses by increasing real estate depreciation, personal property depreciation or operating expenses.

Accrual accounting recognizes revenue when it is earned. Cash basis accounting recognizes revenue when payment is received. Accrual basis taxpayers can review revenue which has been booked but not yet received. In some cases, it may be appropriate to increase the allowance for bad debt. There is little cash basis taxpayers can do to reduce revenue (after the end of the year).

Most real estate owners can sharply increase depreciation by obtaining a cost segregation study. Real estate depreciation schedules are typically established by simply separating land and long-life property. Long-life property is depreciated over 27.5 years for rental residential property and 39 years for commercial property.

Cost segregation can usually increase depreciation by 50% to 100% during the first five to seven years of ownership by allocating a portion of the cost basis to 5, 7 and 15 year property. In addition, real estate owners can "catch-up" depreciation under reported in prior years without filing amended tax returns.

Fixed asset audits can be a cost effective means to increase operating expenses by removing phantom assets, removing operating expenses mistakenly coded as capital expenditures and correcting the depreciable life for incorrectly coded items.