The election is real and for some owners it matters. Whether you are one of them depends on things no ad has ever asked you, and on who answers for the return afterward.
Send last year's return and Steven Palmieri reads it before you ever get on the phone. Then twenty minutes on what it tells us: whether an S corporation election is even the right question for your numbers, what it would have changed on the year you already filed, what is still open for this year, and what it would add in payroll, filings, and bookkeeping that has to hold up. You get the honest version, including the version where the answer is to leave it alone. The tax plan is part of the monthly work here instead of a $15,000 product sold on its own, and the call costs you nothing.
S corp tax strategies get advertised as the one move you were stupid for missing. Here is what the ad leaves out, and all of it gets settled in twenty minutes with your return in front of us.
Six months of promises from people whose entire job was the click, and nothing from the person who signs your return. Maybe the election would have done nothing for you. You still deserved to hear that out loud instead of wondering what else has never come up.
Electing is paperwork. What comes after it is payroll running every month, a separate business return every year, and books clean enough to stand behind whatever you decided to pay yourself. The ad account that sold you the conversion will not be answering for any of that, and neither will the video. You will.
An election made in the wrong year, or made when your profit and the way you already take money out do not support it, becomes something you unwind later at your own expense. Nobody runs that math for you in a sixty second video. It is the first thing we run on the call.
It might, and for plenty of owners it does not move enough to justify the machinery it drags in. The election changes how you take money out of your own business, a salary the IRS would consider reasonable plus distributions, and that changes how self employment style tax lands on you. Whether it comes out ahead depends on your profit, how you pay yourself today, your state, and what else sits on your return. Anyone quoting you a figure before reading that return is guessing.
An election, and then a different way of running the business. You go on payroll at a salary that has to hold up if anyone asks, the rest comes out as distributions, and the business files its own return every year. Bookkeeping stops being optional, because the numbers behind that salary are the whole defense. None of it is exotic. It is work, and somebody has to own it.
Ask them why, and listen closely to the answer. There are real situations where the election would cost you more than it saves, and an advisor worth the fee tells you so before you ask. There are also filers who never look up from the forms long enough to raise it. Twenty minutes on last year's return tells you which one you have been paying.
Some of it is still open and some of it can only be set up for next year, and which is which depends on where you are and what you have already done. The election itself has a filing window early in the year, which is one more reason this gets decided in the fall instead of discovered in the spring. Bring the return and you leave the call with the list.
That depends on how the business is taxed, which is the part most owners are never told. Customers generally do not have to issue a 1099-NEC to a corporation, and an S corporation counts as one, with limited exceptions such as payments to attorneys. An LLC follows its tax classification instead: taxed as a sole proprietorship or a partnership it generally gets the 1099, and after an S corp election it generally does not. Your customers go by the W-9 you handed them, so an election nobody passed along turns into mismatched forms later. The exceptions are listed on irs.gov in the instructions for Form 1099-NEC. It is one of the things we check when we read last year's return.
Steven Palmieri and his team. The same people keep the monthly books, run the payroll, do the planning, and prepare and file the returns, so nothing gets handed to a stranger at the deadline. We do not perform audits, reviews, or compilations. If a lender needs audited statements, a licensed audit firm does that piece and we hand them clean books to work from.