Stephen Nelson on Three Hidden Surprises in PPP Loan Forgiveness

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Rick Telberg: Hi, I'm here today with Steve Nelson, CPA of Nelson CPA, managing member. You probably know him best because he's sold five million or more copies of QuickBooks For Dummies. Steve, thanks for joining us today.

Steve Nelson: Thanks, Rick.

Rick Telberg: The first question is, let's talk about PPP loan forgiveness. What are the surprises?

Steve Nelson: One of the big surprises is that as compared to the way we help our clients do the tax accounting for a return, PPP is going to be much more working and require much more precision. A lot of the things that we, and our clients, have gotten used to, and some of the imprecision, that's just not going to be there for the PPP loan application. There's a single accounting period, not multiple accounting periods. It's going to be one application, not something you can amend. 100% of any mistakes you make are going to impact forgiveness, so that's a very, very different type of accounting that we're going to need to do.

Rick Telberg: You said people should stop worrying about the forgiveness. Why is that?

Steve Nelson: Yes, that's been a real surprise in this program, I think. With the PPP Flexibility Act, Congress created some safe harbors that let people probably wriggle out of losing forgiveness. The other thing is, is that this program was, originally, set up and suited to deal with eight weeks of payroll and a little bit extra for some other things like rent and utilities.

When they changed the rules and allow a 24-week window, it means that you might not need to worry about forgiveness due to something like a reduction in headcount. It would be not uncommon to cut half of your employees and yet still have more than enough payroll cost to receive almost total forgiveness. That's going to be a surprise, but it's an important thing for businesses is to stay alert to, and our clients to stay alert to, so that people make it through this pandemic.

Boy, I think this is going to be much more like applying for a mortgage application when you're a self-employed person, and the bank maybe doesn't trust you, in terms of the substantiation, or it's going to be dealing with an IRS correspondence audit where you don't just give them a number, but you give them a number and then you back it up with lots and lots of documentation. That's going to be something that is going to surprise many small business PPP borrowers. And it's going to overwhelm a number of those folks, I'm afraid.

Rick Telberg: Are we looking at a year-around busy season for the next two years?

Steve Nelson: That's an interesting thought. This year we've had the first half of the year the tax season. We're going to have a PPP loan forgiveness application season this year, I think we're going to have an extension season this year. Definitely, this year feels that way. I think our revenues and billing have looked that way. We stalled briefly, when that first nursing home had all the infection, but other than that, we've been very, very solid. Gosh, it's easy to believe that if we have a lot of activity next year, it could look the same way. I hadn't thought of that, but that's a real possibility, I suppose.