For 2018, you can elect the de minimis safe harbor to expense assets costing $2,500 or less ($5,000 with audited financial statements or something similar).
The term “safe harbor” means that the IRS will accept your expensing of the qualified assets if you properly abide by the rules of the safe harbor.
Here are four benefits of this safe harbor:
- Safe harbor expensing is superior to Section 179 expensing because you don’t have the recapture period that can complicate your taxes.
- Safe harbor expensing takes depreciation out of the equation.
- Safe harbor expensing simplifies your tax and business records because you don’t have the assets cluttering your books.
- The safe harbor does not reduce your overall ceiling on Section 179 expensing.
Here’s how the safe harbor works. Say you are a small business that elects the $2,500 ceiling for safe harbor expensing and you buy two desks costing $2,100 each. On the invoice, you see the quantity “two” and the total cost of $4,200, plus sales tax of $378 and a $200 delivery and setup charge, for a total of $4,778.
Before this safe harbor, you would have capitalized each desk at $2,389 ($4,778 ÷ 2) and then either Section 179 expensed or depreciated it. You would have kept the desks in your depreciation schedules until you disposed of them.
Now, with the safe harbor, you simply expense the desks as office supplies. This makes your tax life much easier.
To benefit from the safe harbor, you and I do a two-step process. It works like this:
Step 1. For safe harbor protection, you must have in place an accounting policy—at the beginning of the tax year—that requires expensing of an amount of your choosing, up to the $2,500 or $5,000 limit. We can help you with this.
Step 2. When we prepare your tax return, we make the election on your tax return for you to use safe harbor expensing. This requires that we attach the election statement to your federal tax return and file that tax return by the due date (including extensions).
If you want to use this safe harbor in 2018, we need to get this set up so that it is in place as soon as possible.
