By De Lon Harris
Commissioner, Small Business Self-Employed
September 27, 2021

Tackling complex tax compliance issues is something I take great pride in doing as part of my job as the Commissioner for the Small Business/Self Employed (SB/SE) Examination division. I also see it as my responsibility to make sure my organization helps taxpayers navigate those complex issues and provides the tools that we have available for them to be successful and compliant business owners.

If you want to understand what is going on in the world, it is simply a matter of following the money trail. And at $72 a dose, there is a lot of money to be made from the government Covid response.

You can follow the trail by first knowing that FOX, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS are owned by financial asset management companies Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock, which also own the four major experimental Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers.

Now here is an interesting idea for those of you who are trying to find a job, but are sick and tired of the cancel culture going on in our country. Their mission is to unite a community of businesses and job seekers who value and preserve the freedom to work.

Beginning in 2022, if you send 100 or more W-2s you must send them electronically

The Taxpayer First Act mandates electronic filing of IRS forms including W-2s

The IRS issued Notice 2021-52, an annual notice providing updated special per diem rate information for the federal fiscal year starting October 1, 2021. Because employees may not claim itemized deductions for unreimbursed business expenses, including travel expenses, per diem rate information applies only to self-employed taxpayers and to employers’ accountable plans and other travel guidelines.

There are certainly a lot of advanced marketing concepts out there: SMS, social media, omnichannel marketing segmentation and artificial intelligence (AI) powered segmentation for a few of them. So, it's no wonder some people may thing that email marketing is on its way out. I've been hearing email is dead for years. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I was recently reading some articles about time management that made a whole lot of sense. It wasn't about some fancy new system with spreadsheets or logs or any other of the myriad systems out there. While these systems, if applied correctly, can be highly effective - they also consume a lot of time to maintain.

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service today issued further guidance on the employee retention credit, including guidance for employers who pay qualified wages after June 30, 2021, and before January 1, 2022, and additional guidance on miscellaneous issues that apply to the employee retention credit in both 2020 and 2021. Notice 2021-49 PDF amplifies prior guidance regarding the employee retention credit provided in Notice

Being into all things computer, I read an interesting article about the WWW code being up for auction. Tim Bernes-Lee, a London-born computer scientist, invented the World Wide Web in 1989. This ended up revolutionizing the sharing and creation of information - one of the most significant inventions since Gutenberg invented the printing press back in the 15th century.

LinkedIn reported some interesting data recently showing how remote marketing jobs are becoming more prevalent in US-based marketing companies. In particular, remote positions for digital marketing specialists and copywriters grew in demand over the last six months as companies have become more comfortable with work-from-home employees.

Morning Consult recently released their 2021 survey of the most trusted brands around the world. They surveyed over 330,000 consumers across 15 markets to provide a global view on why trust matters more than ever for today's brands and businesses, the current state of consumer trust across brands, categories, and how current events are changing the dynamics around trust.

One of the things that I hate the most is having to deal with Captchas, but I hate spam more. When I first set up this website, I was spending hours deleting spam user accounts and posts. Trying to go over my site logs was a nightmare because the majority of the logs were filled filled with bots trying to attack my site. So I gave in and installed captchas. I added extra questions to my webforms to try and filter out the spam. While these efforts helped, the bots just became smarter and found ways to get around them.