Tax Lawyer Blog

New Rules for Reits With a few exceptions, the new tax law is favorable for REIT investors. The effective federal tax rate, on ordinary REIT dividends, has shrunk from 29.6 percent to 37 percent for individual taxpayers because REIT shareholders are now eligible for the new 20% pass-through deduction. Unit-holders...

The significant increase in the standard deduction and elimination of most itemized deductions under the new tax law means that more taxpayers will be claiming the standard deduction on their 2018 return. Nevertheless, you should always compare the standard deduction with the itemized deductions still available to you in order...

In our last post, we listed some tax deductions that have been eliminated by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. In this post, we describe some deductions that you may have thought were gone, but could still be available to you: Interest on your home equity loan Contrary...

In its efforts to simplify the tax code, Congress included provisions in The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that increased the standard deduction to $12,000 for individuals ($24,000 for married couples) and either modified or eliminated many itemized deductions. As a result, taxpayers and their professional tax advisors...

The Issue Defined In our last post, we described how a taxpayer was not permitted to deduct his significant expenses for fertility treatments involving himself, three egg donors, three gestational surrogates, seven IVF procedures, and two fertility specialists. Here we are going to describe Joseph Morrissey’s main arguments for receiving...

The US tax code addresses the question of whether deducting fertility treatments is allowable. 26 U.S. Code § 213 provides a tax deduction for any medical and dental expenses that a taxpayer incurs during the year that are not compensated for by insurance or otherwise – this includes “the diagnosis,...