As is often the case with the bozos in Congress, they love to slip various tax items into unrelated legislation.  Such was the case with the recently signed Surface Transportation and Veterans Health Care Choice Improvement Act of 2015. 

As part of this new law, some long running due dates for certain kinds of tax returns will be changing in the next year. 

The ones that will likely be most widely felt among the practitioner community are:

Partnerships – Form 1065 (or an extension request) will be due a month earlier than previously, March 15 instead of April 15.  This is no surprise and continues a recent trend to give some distance in time between the due dates of tax returns for pass-through entities and the due dates for individual tax returns (1040s) so that we aren’t scrambling to do all of the tax returns on the same day.   

C Corporations – Form 1120 (or an extension request) will be due four and a half months after the end of the tax year, instead of the long standing three and a half month timeframe.  However, there is an odd exception in the law just for corporations with tax years ending June 30.  Their returns (or extensions) will still be due by September 15, three and a half months after the end of the year.  As a long time believer and advocate of a non-December tax year for corporations, that will mean a lot of due date changes for our clients, except for the several June 30 ones.

Longer Statute of Limitations (SOL)
This highway bill also modified the definition of “Substantial Understatement of Income” that allows IRS an SOL of six years to audit tax returns if the cost bases of assets that were sold were overstated. 

I am often asked how long tax related records need to be retained.  This new provision extends the time you should keep records of assets that were sold to at least six years after the tax returns reporting their sales were filed with IRS.

Forbes had some good recaps of these new changes:

IRS Audit Period Just Doubled From Three Years To Six Years For Many

Many IRS Tax Return Due Dates Just Changed, FBARs Too

For a number of years now, my favorite tax reference source has been The TaxBook.  They recently posted this very informative three page PDF recap of the tax aspects of this highway bill. 

Highway Bill Contains New Tax Law Changes