Business Services | Taxes and Business Strategy
Do you just want to save taxes or do you want to maximize profits? Are these mutually exclusive? Of course we know that one of your primary goals is to maximize profits, and we also know that tax-savings strategies and profit maximization are sometimes in conflict.
Our view is from the owner or manager's perspective when working on tax- planning strategies. We can help you sort out effective planning strategies from those that don’t work as well. It’s our philosophy at W&G to utilize a strategy involving “simple elegance” instead of more intricate and complex tax-planning methods that typically require a lot of post-planning maintenance.
This is tax planning from the top down instead of from the bottom up. There can be a significant difference in the result by employing the top-down approach. Here is what we do:
- Determine the business, investment, or personal objectives.
- Recommend the best value solutions that will require the lowest possible maintenance.
- Implement recommendations or assist you in their implementation.
It may sound simple, but remember that there are all sorts of tax saving devices available to you. Many of them are being sold or "offered" by accounting firms, insurance agents, Wall Street and others. The tax ideas that are being sold fall into several categories.
- Ideas that are easily integrated into your business structure and strategic plan and typically require little maintenance.
- Ideas that are easily integrated but require substantial maintenance.
- Tax avoidance strategies that have little or no relationship to your investment or business objectives.
- Tax strategies that sound too good to be true and probably are.
- Tax strategies that are marketed to the public and will definitely attract scrutiny from the Internal Revenue Service because the strategy has no economic justification whatsoever.
The above list could be a lot longer, but we think we make our point.
The tax strategies we recommend are ones that make sense for the overall health of your business and investments. These strategies may not be the ones that will save the most in taxes.
Another way to describe our philosophy is this: we aren’t afraid of a conflict, however, we don’t pick fights we can’t win and we don’t recommend anything that costs more than it is worth.
We frequently run into tax planning that defers taxes but incurs legal and accounting fees in excess of the tax benefit. We like fees, but not at the expense of your overall business and investment objectives.
Our firm is in business to make money - the best way we know how to do so is to establish long-term relationships with our clients.
Can we recommend a tax strategy? Send us an email of give us a call.