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Tax Alert: States Beginning to Provide Tax Relief Due To Coronavirus

Brian Kelley

Mar 20 2020

3 min read

Filing tax returns is usually a main concern this time of year for individuals and businesses. With the current Coronavirus crisis, however, taxes seem much less important. On March 18, 2020, the IRS provided tax payment relief for individual and corporate taxpayers by delaying the tax payment date from April 15, 2020 until July 15, 2020.

Many states have now indicated that they intend to follow the federal lead for tax payments and/or extensions of time to file. This relief in payments or tax return filings varies by state, and more state announcements may be made in the coming days/weeks. To that end, the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) has created a state-by-state chart to begin tracking the various state responses as to:

how they are responding to the Coronavirus pandemic; and
what filing and tax payment relief they will be granting, if any.

Here is a link to the AICPA website where you can access the “AICPA State Tax Filing Relief Chart for Coronavirus.”

States That Have Issued Tax Return Filing Guidance

Several states have already issued guidance extending tax return filing and payment deadlines including:

California: extended individuals, corporations, partnerships and LLCs to June 15^th if affected by the Coronavirus pandemic (taxpayers do not need to be directly impacted and will self-identify as done with other natural disasters).
Connecticut: extended its payment and filing due dates for 2019 corporate tax returns CT-1120 and CT-1120CU to June 15^th while also extending the payment due date for CT-1065/CT-1120 SI pass-through entity returns to June 15^th but only extending the filing due date to April 15^th.
Florida: **CORRECTION** Though the Governor announced that there maybe some potential delays for payments of corporate taxes, no extensions have been officially granted and original due dates (May 1^st for calendar year C Corps) remain in place and have not been extended to June 30^th.
Illinois: Attorney General has granted a 30-day extension to file and pay (but interest will accrue) for estate tax returns due between March 16^th and April 15^th.
Maryland: extended non-income business tax returns (sales and use, withholding, admissions & amusement tax, etc.) to June 1^st.
North Carolina: will accept penalty waiver requests for returns due March 15^th as long as they are filed, and taxes paid by April 15^th.
South Carolina: extended the due date for returns and tax payments due between April 1^st through June 1^st to June 1^st.

Since the federal government has only extended the time to pay taxes, but not to file the tax returns, it is unclear now what specific relief states will end up providing. We certainly expect most states to be issuing guidance on whether they will be providing any extension relief over the next few weeks. Please stay tuned and feel free to access the above chart as the AICPA has been updating it regularly.

STAY UP-TO-DATE ON ALL COVID-19 DEVELOPMENTS

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About the Author

Brian Kelley

Brian Kelley, CPA, MST, is a managing director of State & Local Tax (SALT) Services, who has focused exclusively on SALT services for over 25 years. In his role, he performs seller and buyer-side multi-state tax due diligence, nexus studies, and negotiates voluntary disclosures and audit defense.