Current Law
Business income is subject to limited information reporting. Current information reporting of gross receipts exists for only certain types of revenue (from Forms 1099-MISC, 1099-NEC, and 1099-K), and there is no information reporting on total deductible expenses.
Reasons for Change
The tax gap for business income (outside of large corporations) from the most recently published Internal Revenue Service (IRS) estimates is $166 billion a year.1 The scale of this revenue loss is driven primarily by the lack of comprehensive information reporting and the resulting difficulty identifying noncompliance outside of an audit. While the net misreporting percentage is only 5 percent for income subject to substantial information reporting, the net misreporting percentage for certain categories of business income exceeds 50 percent.
Requiring comprehensive information reporting on the inflows and outflows of financial accounts will increase the visibility of gross receipts and deductible expenses to the IRS. Increased visibility of business income will enhance the effectiveness of IRS enforcement measures and encourage voluntary compliance.
Proposal
This proposal would create a comprehensive financial account information reporting regime. Financial institutions would report data on financial accounts in an information return. The annual return will report gross inflows and outflows with a breakdown for physical cash, transactions with a foreign account, and transfers to and from another account with the same owner. This requirement would apply to all business and personal accounts from financial institutions, including bank, loan, and investment accounts,2 with the exception of accounts below a low de minimis gross flow threshold of $600 or fair market value of $600.
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