Early on December 2, 2017, the Senate passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the “Senate Bill”). This blog entry describes certain provisions of the Senate Bill that would have the most significant impact on the nonprofit community, including important differences between the Senate Bill and the prior version of the Senate bill and the bill passed by the House of Representatives (the “House Bill”) (both of which we described several weeks ago in “Updates for Tax-Exempt Organizations from the Senate Markup to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act”).
universities
Advisory Committee on Tax Exempt and Government Entities Makes Recommendations on Reporting of Unrelated Business Taxable Income
By Jamie Bowles on
The Advisory Committee on Tax Exempt and Government Entities (“ACT”), an IRS advisory panel, made several recommendations on issues relating to unrelated business taxable income (“UBTI”) in its annual report to the IRS (the “Report”). In recent years, the IRS has focused on UBTI reporting for tax exempt organizations; issues relating to UBTI reporting were addressed in Colleges and Universities Project Final Report, which was released in April last year. In light of the IRS’ increased focus on UBTI reporting, ACT selected UBTI as a focus for its annual project.
IRS Issues Wake Up Call to Colleges and Universities — Congress to Hold Hearings
By Jacob I. Friedman on
The IRS released its Final Report on its five year study of the audit results of colleges and universities. Lois G. Lerner, Director of the Exempt Organizations division of the IRS announced the “long awaited” posting of the report.
In 2008, the IRS sent a 33 page questionnaire to 400 randomly selected colleges and universities. In 2010, the IRS released an Interim Report. Following review of the responses and Forms 990 and 990-T, the IRS selected 34 schools for audit. The audits were limited to two specific areas, unrelated business income tax (UBIT) and executive compensation.
The Final report was released on April 25, 2013. The IRS points out that because the 34 organizations that were audited were not randomly selected, the schools do not represent a statistical sample.