Tax Tips for Higher Education

We continually see colleges reporting workers as “Key Employees” on Form 990, Part VII when they do not have to. This is easily remedied.

Issue One of the oft-encountered errors on Form 990 occurs in the “Governance” section (Form 990, Part VI, Section A) and concerns the answer to whether a family or business relationship exists between the organization's current officers, directors, trustees, or key...

Form 990 asks about whether your institution has written conflict of interest, whistleblower, and document retention/ destruction policies. For myriad reasons, you should be in a position to answer “Yes” to all three of these line items. We covered conflict of interest policies a few weeks ago. Herein we discuss the other two.

In order to utilize the “Special Rule” at Schedule B (Form 990), the IRS requires colleges (and others) to now complete Schedule A (Form 990), Part II. This may cause significant extra work with regard to completing Form 990 for many institutions.

We have talked with several Christian colleges recently who are looking into utilizing tax-exempt bond financing to build additional facilities. This can be a positive endeavor – not to mention a worthy revenue enhancement opportunity (REO) – but care must be taken to “get it right”. In this first of a multi-part series, we begin to look at this highly technical arena.