Small Business Tax

If you travel extensively on business, you probably know the drill: Both the airline and the hotel often will offer a lower rate if the stay includes a Saturday night. Strategy: Stay until Sunday. Besides the discount, the cost of staying an extra day is deductible as business travel, even if the work has been completed.

A federal trial court has directed an employer that appropriately withheld payroll taxes from an arbitration award to pay back the amount withheld to the employee. An employer must obey an arbitration award to the letter, the court ruled.

You may not be able to qualify for the full home sale exclusion ($250,000 singles; $500,000 for married joint-filing couples) when you sell your principal residence. However, if you can’t get the whole loaf of bread, at least you might be able to get a slice of it. Strategy: Claim a partial home sale exclusion on your personal tax return.

The IRS has announced it is extending and tweaking a pilot program designed to cut down on identity theft. The guidelines allow you to use a truncated ver­sion of taxpayer identification numbers (TINs) when your business issues certain statements and 1099s.

Unemployment insurance benefits are designed to help employees who lose their jobs through no fault of their own. Since employers pay into the fund that pays out unemployment benefits, it's in your interest to contest benefits for undeserving former employees. Here's how to go about doing so.

Tax audits of individual taxpayers went up, especially for high-income folks, according to the IRS' new "Data Book" for its 2010 fiscal year. Other changes were revealed for taxpayers with total positive income between $200,000 and $1 million, businesses with gross receipts of $25,000 and higher, and individuals claiming the earned income credit.

A staffing company that provides workers for major hotels in the Dallas-Fort Worth area has agreed to pay more than $242,000 to employees after a U.S. Department of Labor investigation uncovered Fair Labor Standards Act violations.

Have you heard about the Houston Astros fan who was taxed on the doughnut coupons he won as a prize? There’s a valuable tax lesson to be learned from it. Strategy: Simply turn down prizes and awards you don’t want. They may constitute taxable income whether you use the item or not.

It usually takes a long time—39 years, to be exact—to recoup the full cost of a business building through depreciation deductions. But there’s a way to secure faster tax benefits. Strategy: Separate building components for tax purposes. As long as you meet certain requirements, you may write off the cost of some building components in only five or seven years.

Food service giant Sodexo has labeled some of its employees as “hard to reach”: those who work at client locations or telework from home or whose jobs don’t involve regular use of computers or e-mail. Now it’s offering managers several methods to reach out to them to ensure that they have knowledge, team spirit and the sense of belonging that are necessary to build a highly engaged workforce.