Determining Actual Payment For U.S. Tax Purposes
For tax purposes, it is important to determine the timing of actual payment and whether it qualifies as a deduction in a taxpayer's calculation of taxable income.
Cash payments occur at the time of payment. This is the easy case, but payments in other forms can be trickier. Payment also occurs when the taxpayer transfers property or performs services in lieu of making a cash payment. Payment by check is deemed to occur when the check is delivered, as long as the check is honored on presentation by the payee. This rule is enforced even where presentation does not occur until the next taxable year, and even though the taxpayer could stop payment on the check in the meantime. Postdated checks, however, are not considered payment when delivered. Generally, payment by credit card occurs at the point of the sale and not when the taxpayer is billed by the credit card company or when the taxpayer pays the bill.
Read more about this topic: Payment
Famous quotes containing the words determining, actual, payment, tax and/or purposes:
“A quality is something capable of being completely embodied. A law never can be embodied in its character as a law except by determining a habit. A quality is how something may or might have been. A law is how an endless future must continue to be.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“There are always those who are willing to surrender local self-government and turn over their affairs to some national authority in exchange for a payment of money out of the Federal Treasury. Whenever they find some abuse needs correction in their neighborhood, instead of applying the remedy themselves they seek to have a tribunal sent on from Washington to discharge their duties for them, regardless of the fact that in accepting such supervision they are bartering away their freedom.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“What we call a democratic society might be defined for certain purposes as one in which the majority is always prepared to put down a revolutionary minority.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)