October 3, 2024

Bucks Blog: What to Do if You Missed the Tax Filing Deadline

O.K., it’s now after April 15. If you haven’t filed your income tax returns or an extension, it’s time for damage control.

The Internal Revenue Service advises filing as soon as possible after the deadline to lessen the impact of the late-filing or late-payment penalties, and interest, you will have to pay.

“File as soon as possible,” said Melissa Labant, director of tax advocacy for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. “Don’t think, ‘Oh, the deadline passed so there’s no rush now.’”

If you are owed a refund, you won’t be charged a penalty for filing late, the I.R.S. says. But if you’re sitting on a refund, what are you waiting for?

The agency generally won’t waive interest on any bill due, but it will consider abating penalties if you can show a “reasonable cause” for filing late.

What might qualify as reasonable to the I.R.S?

Tax experts say the answer isn’t black or white, and the agency is getting tougher about acceptable excuses. But generally, a significant illness, a serious accident or other emergency beyond your control qualifies, said Joseph Falanga, managing direct of UHY Advisors, a tax and business consulting company.

Still, it’s important to act quickly, he said, and file your return and pay any balance due as soon as possible. “You want to show the I.R.S. that you want to comply and that you had no intention to avoid your responsibility,” he said.

The agency will look at your history when evaluating your request, he said. If you’ve always filed on time and paid your taxes, that will help your case. If you tend to file late and have a history of being slow to pay, that will work against your claim, he said.

Usually, if you file your return late, you’ll get a notice of penalty from the I.R.S. At that time, you (or your tax preparer, if you work with one) can respond with a “Dear I.R.S.” letter, explaining why you filed late and why you think you are eligible for an abatement of the penalties, Ms. Labant said.

In the case of circumstances that affect many people, the I.R.S. often issues a broad notification of possible penalty abatements. On Monday, for instance, the I.R.S. said it would grant penalty relief to anyone unable to file on time due to severe storms that hit parts of the South and Midwest in the days before April 15. Power outages and transportation problems made it impossible in some cases for some taxpayers and tax preparers to submit returns and payments by Monday’s midnight deadline.

Also on Monday, the I.R.S. said it would grant extra time for taxpayers in the Boston area, and would waive penalties, due to the disruption caused by the bombing at the Boston Marathon.

Have you ever missed the tax filing deadline? What happened?

Article source: http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/what-to-do-if-you-missed-the-tax-filing-deadline/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Novartis Scraps Non-Compete Payment to Departing Chairman

Novartis said it cancelled an agreement with Daniel Vasella to pay him 72 million Swiss francs over the next six years to keep him from sharing his knowledge with competitors. The decision comes three days before the company’s board is to face investors at the annual shareholder meeting.

“We continue to believe in the value of a non-compete, however, the decision to cancel the agreement and all related compensation addresses the concern of shareholders and other stakeholders,” Novartis’s vice chairman, Ulrich Lehner, said in a statement.

The size of the planned payment, which was revealed last Friday, had outraged investors just two weeks before a Swiss referendum to give shareholders more power to determine executive compensation. Mr. Vasella had previously said that he would step down as chairman at Novartis’s shareholder meeting on Friday.

In a statement on Tuesday, Mr. Vasella said he understood that many in Switzerland found the amount of the compensation “unreasonably high, despite the fact I had announced my intention to make the net amount available for philanthropic activities.”

On Friday, Mr. Vasella had said the annual payments were “according to fair market value” and that it had been important to Novartis that he refrains “from making my knowledge and know-how available to competitors and to take advantage of my experience with the company.”

Swiss lawmakers and shareholder activists criticized the company over the weekend and on Monday for not making the amount of the planned payment public earlier. They also contended that the payment was just the latest of several bad decisions by Novartis on executive pay.

Ethos, a Swiss group of investors, on Monday called on Novartis to immediately cancel the contract with Mr. Vasella and take back any money already paid.

Christophe Darbellay, president of the Christian Democratic People’s Party, told a Swiss newspaper, SonntagsZeitung, that Mr. Vasella’s compensation was “beyond evil.” Simonetta Sommaruga, the Swiss federal justice minister, told another newspaper, SonntagsBlick, that the payment was an “enormous blow for the social cohesion of our country” and that such “help-yourself mentality” was damaging confidence in the economy.

Even before the latest revelation, Mr. Vasella’s pay had been at the center of shareholder complaints. Mr. Vasella is currently receiving 12.4 million Swiss francs, or about $13.4 million, a year, according to the company’s 2012 annual report. The board has promised to consider changes in the way it pays its senior executives next year.

Pressure on companies to cut executive pay and give shareholders a greater say on the compensation levels is mounting. Recent opinion polls showed that Swiss voters were likely to approve changes at a referendum on March 3 that would effectively allow shareholders to determine executive pay. The referendum also proposes no payments when new executives join or executives leave, and no payments in advance.

At least five of Europe’s 20 highest-paid chief executives work for a Swiss company, including the food company Nestlé and the drug maker Roche, according to Bloomberg News. Swiss business lobby groups warned that such a change would harm the Swiss economy by discouraging companies from moving business to Switzerland.

Mr. Vasella helped orchestrate the merger between Sandoz and Ciba-Geigy that created Novartis in 1996 and was chief executive of Novartis for 14 years after that. He was named chairman in 1999. Jörg Reinhardt, who was once in the running to become the Novartis chief executive but then left to run the drug division at Bayer, is to replace Mr. Vasella.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/20/business/global/novartis-scraps-non-compete-payment-to-departing-chairman.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

You’re the Boss Blog: A Social Business Strikes a Deal With Big Tobacco

Sustainable Profits

The challenges of a waste-recycling business.

A few months ago I wrote a blog post about TerraCycle’s intention to create a national recycling program for all waste, even including cigarette butts. As our programs have grown, we have had frequent internal debates about what kinds of companies we want to partner with to help them make their waste recyclable (which in turn makes their products greener).

We have come to understand that every industry has its issues. For example, the food industry has many debates around the use of refined sugar, corn and soy in its products. And the garment industry has issues involving the use of leather and fur, and the cosmetics industry has challenges concerning animal testing, which some retailers require. The list goes on, and I am becoming increasingly confident that there really is no perfect product, which we should all consider when buying stuff.

A month after that post, in mid-May, we introduced the a cigarette-recycling program in Canada. It has been a success with more than 400 collection locations registered and more than 180,000 butts already collected. Somewhat to my surprise, several Canadian media outlets wrote positively about the program. Already, if you search “cigarette recycling,” we rank prominently in the top 10 links that come up.

And now, we’ve started a similar program in the United States along with Santa Fe Tobacco, which is owned by R.J. Reynolds. We had more than 220 collection locations sign up in the first 24 hours and more than 400 within a few days. [Read more…]

Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/a-social-business-strikes-a-deal-with-big-tobacco/?partner=rss&emc=rss

You’re the Boss: How Do You Engage Your Customers?

A TerraCycle collection brigade.Courtesy of TerraCycle.A TerraCycle collection team.
Sustainable Profits

At TerraCycle, consumers can interact with our business in two crucial ways. First, they can send us garbage (postage paid), and for each piece of waste they collect, we typically give 2 cents to the charity or school of their choice. Today, more than 21 million people in the United States are actively involved in our collection programs, and there’s another 2 million participating outside of the United States. The second way to interact with TerraCycle is for consumers to buy the products that are made from the waste we’ve collected. These products are typically available at major big-box stores, including Wal-Mart and Target.

Encouraging consumers to get involved in the latter function, buying TerraCycle products made from waste, is relatively straight forward: produce a product that is better, greener and cheaper that a similar conventional product. While achieving these goals can be difficult for green products (as their ingredients and/or manufacturing processes typically cost more), it’s less difficult for TerraCycle because we start with waste as the raw material. That keeps our costs down and makes the proposition to the consumer something of a no-brainer. If the customer already intends to buy a cooler, we just have to convince them to buy the TerraCycle cooler.

On the flip side, encouraging consumers to maximize their waste collections with TerraCycle is a very different question. There are no comparables out there, except perhaps recycling. And the customer’s intention is far from established — until we offered the opportunity, the customer wasn’t intending to recycle his or her pens. Since there are no other companies in the world that collect and recycle these waste streams, a consumer first needs to know that the program exists, then has to care enough to participate, and then has to sign up and start collecting.

It’s not easy, but we have been relatively successful getting people to sign up, mostly through aggressive public relations (we generate 100 to 250 articles a week about our programs globally), our own media (TV show, books, blogs, magazine, etc.), and by working with our brand partners to get the word out (the TerraCycle logo is on more than 15 billion packages a year and in sponsor-paid television commercials about our brigade programs).

The question then becomes, how do we encourage participation in our programs and increase collection rates from, say, 2.5 percent (the percentage of America’s juice pouches that we currently collect)? We are in the middle of introducing a number of initiatives. I would love to hear what you would encourage or what you have done in your business to solve a similar challenge. Here they are:

Pro-active customer service. TerraCycle, like many companies, has a customer service department that focuses on solving any challenge that our consumers have while running our programs. Typically customer service departments are entirely reactive. We recently decided to move to a more proactive approach that will involve contacting collectors to see if we can help them with anything.

Support material. We have always provided support material, like posters, for our collectors. We recently decided that we will start offering more rewards for passing certain milestones, like 1,000 pieces of waste collected.

Contests and incentives. About five months ago we began offering contests and incentives to drive collection.  These range from incentives to encourage the first shipment (the theory being that that’s sort of an ice breaker) to collection contests that pin one location against another (like which school in Wisconsin will collect the most waste this quarter).

Brigade Leaders: We have begun to identify the people who are the top collectors in our system, and we are asking them to help those who don’t do as well. In exchange, the leaders will get credit for 20 percent of the increase that the low collectors experience. The goal is to build up a network of hundreds of brigade leaders that become local ambassadors of the programs.

To some extent, all of these tactics work, but my biggest challenge is to measure which ones work best and then determine our commitment to each category. It’s very important for us to spend wisely — contests will cost us more than $50,000 this year, outreach another $50,000, and we have already spent more than $75,000 on resource development.

In the end I don’t know if we are doing enough. I don’t know if we are doing the right things. And most importantly, we have a very difficult time measuring the efficacy of our various activities.

Tom Szaky is the chief executive of TerraCycle, which is based in Trenton.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ebc45fe2537d8a7e32cad50023715143