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Tax credits or deductions for home improvement

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Financial advisors and tax professionals whose clients are repairing or renovating their home or another real estate property can help them unlock some savings in the process.

The many available strategies for tax savings tied to home improvement begin with the question of whether the client is working on their personal residence, a house or apartment where they live but also operate their own business, or a property that they have invested in as a real estate endeavor, according to certified public accountant Miklos Ringbauer of Los Angeles-based MiklosCPA. And they revolve around regular meetings with clients discussing any plans they have for upgrades and exploring potential tax strategies, he said in an interview.

“That’s exactly where the true value of a financial advisor or a tax professional comes in to proactively support the taxpayer,” Ringbauer said.

READ MORE: 24 tax tips for self-employed clients

For a personal home, the clients may not know that their home repair could bring savings through the federal energy efficient home improvement credit and the residential clean energy credit. While the rules for each place restrictions on how much and what type of expenses are eligible, more than 3.4 million families received $8.4 billion in federal tax credits last year on top of reducing their energy bills and qualifying for many state-level credits available to them.

“Sometimes state incentives are much more than the federal government’s,” Ringbauer said, citing the tax advantages for California taxpayers tied to widespread droughts in the state a couple of years ago. “The local governments and the state encouraged the taxpayers to create these drought-resistent environments, and they gave a lot of financial support.”

READ MORE: Clients can go green, save greenbacks on eco-friendly home repairs

Even though many basic home improvements such as fixing a leak, painting a bedroom or replacing a broken window pane won’t typically be eligible for tax savings, the clients may be forgetting that installing a ramp, rails or a pool, widening doors for a wheelchair or redoing a bathroom could draw deductions as a medical expense.

“Many taxpayers don’t think about this,” Ringbauer said. “If it increases the value of the home, then you may not be able to take the deduction, but the good news is that it increases your basis.”

For clients who run businesses out of their homes, that window replacement for their office area or the creation of an addition to their house to accommodate their company may deliver some itemized savings. In addition, the interest cost of their mortgage, refinancing or home equity line of credit could garner deductions.

“If I needed extra capital, I have the ability to take a deduction on that mortgage payment,” Ringbauer said. “It’s incredibly valuable to reduce my self-employment business income.”

READ MORE: Tax court ruling on ‘Masters’ or ‘Augusta’ rule offers cautionary tale 

When it comes to real estate investments, the forms claiming home-improvement deductions and credits on a state or federal level “are not easy to fill out,” and, “doing things in the wrong bucket or putting it on the wrong line can cost you thousands of dollars,” he pointed out. However, they come in very handy in the sale or generational transfer of a property. 

The biggest capital investments into the property, such as a roof replacement or the installation of a new bathroom, could result in tax advantages for the owner as well, through so-called cost segregation methods that break up the structure into various components depreciating on different schedules, Ringbauer noted. That may make the financing much more feasible.

“I have positive cash flow, but for tax purposes, I wiped out my income in the process. And then even throwing a tax credit on top of it can be significantly beneficial for a real estate investor,” he said, noting that there is a distinction for the IRS and other agencies between the large capital projects and standard repairs such as fixing a door. “It’s very important, and that’s where many taxpayers, especially if they are self-preparing returns, run into challenges.”

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Accounting

IAASB tweaks standards on working with outside experts

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The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board is proposing to tailor some of its standards to align with recent additions to the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants’ International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants when it comes to using the work of an external expert.

The proposed narrow-scope amendments involve minor changes to several IAASB standards:

  • ISA 620, Using the Work of an Auditor’s Expert;
  • ISRE 2400 (Revised), Engagements to Review Historical Financial Statements;
  • ISAE 3000 (Revised), Assurance Engagements Other than Audits or Reviews of Historical Financial Information;
  • ISRS 4400 (Revised), Agreed-upon Procedures Engagements.

The IAASB is asking for comments via a digital response template that can be found on the IAASB website by July 24, 2025.

In December 2023, the IESBA approved an exposure draft for proposed revisions to the IESBA’s Code of Ethics related to using the work of an external expert. The proposals included three new sections to the Code of Ethics, including provisions for professional accountants in public practice; professional accountants in business and sustainability assurance practitioners. The IESBA approved the provisions on using the work of an external expert at its December 2024 meeting, establishing an ethical framework to guide accountants and sustainability assurance practitioners in evaluating whether an external expert has the necessary competence, capabilities and objectivity to use their work, as well as provisions on applying the Ethics Code’s conceptual framework when using the work of an outside expert.  

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Accounting

Tariffs will hit low-income Americans harder than richest, report says

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President Donald Trump’s tariffs would effectively cause a tax increase for low-income families that is more than three times higher than what wealthier Americans would pay, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

The report from the progressive think tank outlined the outcomes for Americans of all backgrounds if the tariffs currently in effect remain in place next year. Those making $28,600 or less would have to spend 6.2% more of their income due to higher prices, while the richest Americans with income of at least $914,900 are expected to spend 1.7% more. Middle-income families making between $55,100 and $94,100 would pay 5% more of their earnings. 

Trump has imposed the steepest U.S. duties in more than a century, including a 145% tariff on many products from China, a 25% rate on most imports from Canada and Mexico, duties on some sectors such as steel and aluminum and a baseline 10% tariff on the rest of the country’s trading partners. He suspended higher, customized tariffs on most countries for 90 days.

Economists have warned that costs from tariff increases would ultimately be passed on to U.S. consumers. And while prices will rise for everyone, lower-income families are expected to lose a larger portion of their budgets because they tend to spend more of their earnings on goods, including food and other necessities, compared to wealthier individuals.

Food prices could rise by 2.6% in the short run due to tariffs, according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab. Among all goods impacted, consumers are expected to face the steepest price hikes for clothing at 64%, the report showed. 

The Yale Budget Lab projected that the tariffs would result in a loss of $4,700 a year on average for American households.

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Accounting

At Schellman, AI reshapes a firm’s staffing needs

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Artificial intelligence is just getting started in the accounting world, but it is already helping firms like technology specialist Schellman do more things with fewer people, allowing the firm to scale back hiring and reduce headcount in certain areas through natural attrition. 

Schellman CEO Avani Desai said there have definitely been some shifts in headcount at the Top 100 Firm, though she stressed it was nothing dramatic, as it mostly reflects natural attrition combined with being more selective with hiring. She said the firm has already made an internal decision to not reduce headcount in force, as that just indicates they didn’t hire properly the first time. 

“It hasn’t been about reducing roles but evolving how we do work, so there wasn’t one specific date where we ‘started’ the reduction. It’s been more case by case. We’ve held back on refilling certain roles when we saw opportunities to streamline, especially with the use of new technologies like AI,” she said. 

One area where the firm has found such opportunities has been in the testing of certain cybersecurity controls, particularly within the SOC framework. The firm examined all the controls it tests on the service side and asked which ones require human judgment or deep expertise. The answer was a lot of them. But for the ones that don’t, AI algorithms have been able to significantly lighten the load. 

“[If] we don’t refill a role, it’s because the need actually has changed, or the process has improved so significantly [that] the workload is lighter or shared across the smarter system. So that’s what’s happening,” said Desai. 

Outside of client services like SOC control testing and reporting, the firm has found efficiencies in administrative functions as well as certain internal operational processes. On the latter point, Desai noted that Schellman’s engineers, including the chief information officer, have been using AI to help develop code, which means they’re not relying as much on outside expertise on the internal service delivery side of things. There are still people in the development process, but their roles are changing: They’re writing less code, and doing more reviewing of code before it gets pushed into production, saving time and creating efficiencies. 

“The best way for me to say this is, to us, this has been intentional. We paused hiring in a few areas where we saw overlaps, where technology was really working,” said Desai.

However, even in an age awash with AI, Schellman acknowledges there are certain jobs that need a human, at least for now. For example, the firm does assessments for the FedRAMP program, which is needed for cloud service providers to contract with certain government agencies. These assessments, even in the most stable of times, can be long and complex engagements, to say nothing of the less predictable nature of the current government. As such, it does not make as much sense to reduce human staff in this area. 

“The way it is right now for us to do FedRAMP engagements, it’s a very manual process. There’s a lot of back and forth between us and a third party, the government, and we don’t see a lot of overall application or technology help… We’re in the federal space and you can imagine, [with] what’s going on right now, there’s a big changing market condition for clients and their pricing pressure,” said Desai. 

As Schellman reduces staff levels in some places, it is increasing them in others. Desai said the firm is actively hiring in certain areas. In particular, it’s adding staff in technical cybersecurity (e.g., penetration testers), the aforementioned FedRAMP engagements, AI assessment (in line with recently becoming an ISO 42001 certification body) and in some client-facing roles like marketing and sales. 

“So, to me, this isn’t about doing more with less … It’s about doing more of the right things with the right people,” said Desai. 

While these moves have resulted in savings, she said that was never really the point, so whatever the firm has saved from staffing efficiencies it has reinvested in its tech stack to build its service line further. When asked for an example, she said the firm would like to focus more on penetration testing by building a SaaS tool for it. While Schellman has a proof of concept developed, she noted it would take a lot of money and time to deploy a full solution — both of which the firm now has more of because of its efficiency moves. 

“What is the ‘why’ behind these decisions? The ‘why’ for us isn’t what I think you traditionally see, which is ‘We need to get profitability high. We need to have less people do more things.’ That’s not what it is like,” said Desai. “I want to be able to focus on quality. And the only way I think I can focus on quality is if my people are not focusing on things that don’t matter … I feel like I’m in a much better place because the smart people that I’ve hired are working on the riskiest and most complicated things.”

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