On August 8th, 2024 the IRS announced additional actions to continue processing Employee Retention Tax Credits (ERTC) while working to prevent improper payments to those not qualified. This comes after the IRS issued a moratorium on additional processing of claims submitted after September 14, 2023. Since the moratorium started the IRS digitized information to study a large group of ERTC claims, evaluated next steps and worked on rooting out fraud within the claims.
A few other important parts of the IRS announcement:
The IRS plans to pay out 50,000 low-risk ERC claims beginning in September 2024 for claims received prior to the moratorium.
The IRS will also begin processing and paying out another large block of additional low-risk claims received prior to the moratorium.
The IRS will begin processing claims filed between September 14, 2023, and January 31, 2024.
Following this announcement the IRS also reopened the Voluntary Disclosure Program to help businesses who previously and incorrectly claimed and received the ERTC. Through November 22, 2024, businesses who received an improper ERTC can file and pay back only 85% of the credit received without any penalty or interest.
If you sent in a claim for the ERTC but have yet to hear from the IRS, here is what you should do:
Watch for any notices or letters from the IRS. If you receive a disallowance notice, you can appeal to the Office of Appeals. Feel free to contact us for more information or to discuss your position.
Verify your forms were received:
If you sent your 941x forms to the IRS using certified mail, check that the forms were delivered.
If you didn’t send your forms using certified mail, call the IRS’s business helpline to verify receipt.
Once you have verified your forms were received, call the IRS for a status update:
Using the IRS’s business helpline, request a status update.
Have a copy of the forms available to provide proof of your Church Name, Address, EIN and form information.
This step can be important as Wisdom has had a few clients who reached out to the IRS and received the answer that their claim was accepted, and funds had previously been sent but the check was returned, or the funds were never received. Those churches were then able to work with the IRS to actually receive the funds.
If you are unsure whether your claim was accurate, review the Voluntary Disclosure Program (here) and then reach out to talk with a member of our team.
Want to discuss the ERTC more, contact Wisdom here and let's see how we can partner with you!