Accounting Today just published a nice little article on last-minute tax-planning strategies, and touched on a few other topics as well, such as the flip-flop between partnership and C-Corp tax return due dates.  A short and worthwhile read for accountants.  My favorite excerpt, by Matthew Frooman, a member at the Atlanta office of Top 100 Firm Warren Averett:

“It helps to have a process, a mental or written checklist of how to approach the planning opportunities in that industry,” he said. “So you have a hierarchy of tax planning which starts with a tax-free way to have income. If you can’t figure out a way to have tax-free income, then you go to offsets in terms of deductions from basis or deferral. Then you look at the tax rate itself, the character of the income as to capital gains or ordinary income, and finally you get down to the tax itself. After that, you consider additional offsets in the form of credits.”

“You can approach every engagement with that structure and work through what are the ways of making something tax-free, offsetting income, deferring income, getting a lower tax rate and generating a credit, and then the possibility of buying a credit,” Frooman said. ”Every tax technique should fall into at least one of those categories. For myself, there are too many tools to think through without some sort of structure, so the solution is to prioritize, and decide which tool has the highest impact and is the easiest to apply.”

Read the entire article here: Last-Minute Tax-Planning Strategies | Accounting Today News