It’s That Time of the Year – Income Taxes! for You and Your Clients | APHA Blog : The Alliance of Professional Health Advocates

(Updated March 2021)

Note: this is a good post to bookmark (or “favorite”) so you can come back to it when it’s time to do your income taxes, or print it or send a link to clients and former clients to help them with theirs…

Yes – it’s time to look at preparing our income tax statements for Uncle Sam (or even Justin Trudeau!) How does our paid work affect our income taxes or our clients’ taxes?

Income Tax Information for You

APHA offers quite a bit of support and help for you to not only help you stay organized throughout the year, but to prepare your income taxes, too. Hopefully you saved all your receipts and maybe made some notes along the way last year. And – don’t forget those quarterly payments and 1099s! See what can help you here:

Income Tax Information for Your Clients and Former Clients

Believe it or not, this is where we turn the financial side of medical payments and deductions into a marketing opportunity.

What clients want to know is whether or not payments they make to their advocate are health-related tax deductions. Is it legal to deduct whatever they paid you to help lower their taxes?

Still today (early 2021) there is no definitive answer to that question. The IRS that will eventually make that call, but until the IRS actually audits someone’s taxes and a decision is made specifically about the deductibility of advocacy expenses, we can make only an educated guess.

And that we have – many educated, informed guesses. We’ve had not only an IRS representative, but also a handful of accountants tell us that yes, clients should at least try to deduct their advocacy expenses. There is enough evidence that those expenses will be officially IRS-ruled deductible to give it a try.

My usual disclaimer: I am not an accountant. I don’t even play one on TV. But I have spent many hours in conversations with the IRS and CPAs and now pass these posts on to you to share those professionals’ points-of-view:

So – how do we turn this into a marketing opportunity?

Share these articles and their links with your clients. Put them in a group blast email or in a newsletter that goes out to past, current, and future clients with the explanations you see above. Be sure to provide the same disclaimer (unless, of course, you do work for the IRS, or you are an accountant!)? Then somewhere in the email or newsletter, provide some of your marketing messages to remind them you are there to help and you’d enjoy discussing their needs further at any time.