Loan

Related Party Loans

If you’ve been around closely held businesses long enough, you know that a transfer of money between a business and its owner, or between two related businesses, is sometimes characterized by the parties as a loan (“related party loans”).

However, in order for such a transaction to be respected as a bona fide loan for purposes of the income tax, it will not suffice for the related putative borrower and lender to merely label the transfer of value between them as an obligation to be repaid.[i]Continue Reading Writing Off A Loan – Simultaneous COD Income and Bad Debt Deduction? Not Necessarily

What’s Is It?

When is a loan not a loan? When it’s something else – for example, equity.

This is one of those pesky facts and circumstances issues that plague courts, taxpayers, and tax advisers to no end.

Debt

On one end of the spectrum, we have a pure debtor-creditor relationship. Very, very simply, a lender has transferred a portion of its funds to a borrower entity for the borrower’s use for a stated period of time (the “term” of the loan). In exchange for the use of the lender’s money (the principal), the borrower agrees to pay the lender a fixed rate of interest; basically, compensation for the time value of money – the longer the term of the loan, the higher the rate charged. At the end of the term, the borrower is required to return the principal to the lender, plus the amount of the accrued but unpaid interest. To secure its right to be paid the principal and interest, the lender may require that the borrower provide collateral for the loan, or it may require that the owners of the borrower entity guarantee the borrower’s obligations under the loan. On the liquidation of the borrower entity, the lender is entitled to receive the unpaid principal and interest owed by the borrower and nothing more. However, the lender is entitled to receive this sum before any amounts may be distributed to the owners of the borrower entity. To the extent any amount remains after payment of the principal and interest, such amounts belong to the borrower’s owners.
Continue Reading Shared Appreciation Interest: Debtor-Creditor or Partners?

Head-Scratchers

The Code is chock-full of provisions that will challenge the intellectual capacity, not to mention the patience, of most tax professionals. The complexity of these rules does not arise out of some sadistic intent on the part of Congress, the Treasury, or the IRS to torment taxpayers and their advisers;[i] rather, it is often a reaction to, and a direct function of, the complicated, multifaceted schemes that many of those very same taxpayers and advisers devise with the intent of reducing the taxpayer’s income tax liability.Continue Reading Bona Fide Intercompany Loan – Are you Sure?