Can financial services companies qualify? YES!!!
Time and time again recently when somebody comes to me thinking they don’t qualify for the employee retention credit it turns out they couldn’t be more wrong! Most recently, I had a customer come to me who runs an escrow company. Initially, we both thought their chances were slim. They were a financial services company that was classified as essential, and the housing market was in a boom! How could they qualify?
Chasing a longshot
The financial service sector was allowed to continue business as normal, for the most part, it seemed unlikely they could qualify. Between that and increasing revenues, this was certainly going to be a challenge. This case study is a great example of why there are multiple ways to qualify, and why you need to know all of them!
Revenue is far from the only qualifier for the ERTC. We started to dive into exactly what changes they had to make to their business. It took us 3-4 strategy calls, but we started to realize that they were forced to make significant changes to the way they did business. Forcing everybody to work remotely was the tip of the iceberg; however since they were able to continue working and were considered essential, it wasn’t enough.
Digging deeper!
We continued to dig into all of the changes they had gone through and soon found something that definitely met the IRS definition of, “more than nominal”. A large part of their business came from in-person events and personal interaction with real estate agents. In fact, they had an entire division of their business dedicated to in-person marking and transactions. Since their state had restricted live networking events of any kind, that entire division was rendered fairly useless and the impact on their business was substantial.
As we continued to dig, we realized that the impact easily exceeded 10%! This wasn’t a small impact, it was something that was costing them real money. California forcing the partial shutdown of non-essential business gatherings was costing them money and left an entire division sitting idle!
Time to get to work!
With all of this information in hand, we quickly drafted a narrative report. We documented everything. We outlined and quantified how much not attending these events affected the business, and directly correlated it to cold hard numbers on their bottom line.
It takes a little bit of extra work, but by examining exactly how government mandates forced them to operate differently we were able to establish that they qualified for the ERTC. Taking the time to fully understand this qualified them for substantial amounts of credits that they would have walked away from otherwise.
Let us help!
If you are intimidated by having to know the mandates and qualifiers inside out and don’t want to invest your time in it, then don’t! Give us a call and let us walk you through it. You don’t have anything to lose because we don’t charge anything unless we actually get the opportunity to file for you. I would be happy to discuss your specific situation, brainstorm, strategize and give you honest feedback about whether or not you will qualify.
If there is nothing we can do for you, then we can part ways as friends! In the meantime, do you really want to be left wondering whether or not you are leaving significant amounts of money on the table? Give me 15 minutes of your time and we will quickly get to the bottom of your qualification status once and for all!
For a layman’s guide to the employee retention tax credit check out our roadmap below:
A layman’s guide to the employee retention tax credit!
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