The Internal Revenue Service is focusing on small business owners and self-employed individuals in a campaign during this National Small Business Week.
Spokesman Christopher Miller says the organization will feature information on a variety of topics in their social media. “Like data security tips, tax withholding for their employees, estimated taxes that businesses and self-employed people have to make throughout the year. Available business credits and deductions, and new things like the expanded tax benefit for the depreciation and expensing for items like equipment,” Miller says.
He says they will have some information for relatively new types of small businesses. “We’re also going to have information on the sharing economy for people who are ride share drivers or rent rooms etcetera, people involved in that growing segment of the economy,” Millers says. “This is information that we think will help a broad base of small businesses and self-employed individuals understand their tax responsibilities.”
He says small businesses don’t have large internal departments that take care of a lot of these issues for them. “Definitely smaller businesses have an uphill battle to get all the resources they need and the information they need to grow — especially when it comes to things like data security,” Miller says.
Miller says the data security issue is one that has grown with the small businesses. “It’s an important topic, because routinely now cyber thieves are targeting business people. Because if they are successful, they know that they can get large amounts of information on employees and clients,” according to Miller.
Miller believes the efforts to educate small businesses in protecting their information is working. “We believe it’s having a positive impact. Last year the I-R-S a drop of nearly 70 percent from the previous year in the number of businesses that reported their email had been compromised for instance,” Miller says.”So, although overall I.D. theft continues to be a problem and it is growing — we are having some success as it relates to I.D. theft related to taxes.”
For more information, go to the Internal Revenue Service website at: www.irs.gov.