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Tax season can be complicated for everyone, but as the April 18 filing deadline looms, small-business owners, contractors, entrepreneurs and others face a raft of ever-changing rules and regulations, the Associated Press reported. Plus, many are dealing with delayed returns and refunds from prior tax periods. The Internal Revenue Service has warned of a backlog and says more delays are to be expected. “It’s worse this year than last year,” said Gene Marks, owner of The Marks Group, a small business consulting firm in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. “It seems to get worse every year, and this year definitely worse than it’s been in prior years.” The IRS said earlier this month it was hiring 10,000 workers to deal with a backlog of 23 million items triggered by limiting operations during the coronavirus pandemic. But with understaffing at both the federal and state government levels, CPAs have found it difficult to reach anyone if problems or questions arise. “I’ve never seen this in my career, they’re all understaffed and all behind,” said Scott Orn, chief operating officer for the human resources and accounting startup Kruze Consulting. But he urged companies to be patient with the IRS and state-level tax officials. The government programs provided during the pandemic, including the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans, helped countless small businesses. Orn and other tax experts recommend filing for a tax extension this year, like most years.

U.S. consumer prices have surged more than in other developed economies and one reason may be the massive government support provided to Americans during the pandemic, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Bloomberg News reported. “Fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effect may have contributed to this divergence by raising inflation about 3 percentage points by the end of 2021,” wrote Òscar Jordà, Celeste Liu, Fernanda Nechio and Fabián Rivera-Reyes in the regional Fed’s weekly Economic Letter. “However, without these spending measures, the economy might have tipped into outright deflation and slower economic growth, the consequences of which would have been harder to manage,” they added. The researchers used an index of real disposable income to untangle how much support was received by U.S. households versus other OECD countries. They found two distinct peaks in the U.S. corresponding to the CARES Act, signed into law in March 2020 at the onset of COVID-19, and the American Rescue Plan Act a year later. “Both Acts resulted in an unprecedented injection of direct assistance with a relatively short duration. In contrast, real disposable personal income for our OECD sample increased only moderately during the pandemic,” they wrote. The sample included Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the U.K. The researchers also noted that other analysis, using different assumptions, had found a much smaller contribution to inflation from fiscal policy.

U.S. new vehicle sales could fall to the lowest first-quarter volume in the past decade as chip shortages and the Ukraine crisis squeeze inventories and rising prices push less affluent buyers out of the market, research firm Cox Automotive said yesterday, Reuters reported. U.S. car and light truck sales are expected to fall more than 24% to about 1.22 million units in March and decline more than 16% in the first quarter. "Make no mistake, this market is stuck in low gear," said Charlie Chesbrough, senior economist at Cox Automotive, adding that sales will remain at current levels until supply improves. Cox forecasters said the U.S. economy should not experience a recession. But Cox cut its forecast for U.S. car and light truck sales in all of 2022 to 15.3 million vehicles, down 700,000 vehicles from its January outlook. Fresh lockdowns in China as well as Russia's invasion of Ukraine have reignited supply bottlenecks that were easing over recent months. Tight supplies have pushed new vehicle prices to record high levels. Households with less than $75,000 in annual income now account for nearly two percentage points less of the U.S. light vehicle market than a year ago, Chesbrough said. The average income of a new vehicle buyer is now $124,000.

The Illinois Senate on Thursday passed legislation to allocate $2.7 billion in relief aid to pay down more than half the debt the state owes to the federal government after depleting its unemployment insurance trust fund, Bloomberg News reported. The measure uses American Rescue Plan Act funds to help pay down Illinois’s roughly $4.5 billion loan it took from the federal government to pay benefits when joblessness soared during the pandemic. The bill passed the Senate for a concurrence vote after the Illinois House passed an amended version on Wednesday. It passed the Senate 39 to 16, and now heads to Governor J.B. Pritzker’s desk.

IRS investigators said yesterday that they have uncovered more than $1.8 billion in fraudulent activity related to federal COVID-19 stimulus funds, The Hill reported. Two years after the Trump administration passed the first trillion-dollar stimulus package, which provided $1,200 checks to individuals and forgivable loans to small businesses as the US economy shut down, the IRS said that it has closed 660 criminal cases related to various stimulus bills prompted by the pandemic. “These cases included a broad range of criminal activity, including fraudulently obtained loans, credits and payments meant for American workers, families, and small businesses,” the IRS Criminal Investigation division said in a statement. Many of these are wire fraud cases in which people made false claims about their business or financial situation in order to obtain money from the government. One such case involved the CEO of a nonfunctioning nonprofit organization who pleaded guilty to lying about having 25 employees and an average monthly payroll cost of more than $120,000. He received more than $300,000 from the Paycheck Protection Program, which was deposited into his personal account.

Jekyll & Hyde Club, a New York restaurant popular with tourists for its horror-themed food and shows, filed for bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. The kitschy eatery located in Greenwich Village owes creditors less than $7.5 million, including $1.5 million in back rent, according to papers filed in bankruptcy court in Manhattan. Actors put on shows during dinner and each floor of the restaurant focuses on a different aspect of a fictional, 1930s British explorers club, from science fiction to the Gothic horror of its namesake characters, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Club owner Deacon Brody Management Inc. elected to file under subchapter V of chapter 11 bankruptcy that is designed for small businesses to quickly rearrange debt without the usual expenses associated with bigger corporate reorganization cases, according to court papers.