IRS Quells Unease on Employee Stock Ownership Crackdown (1)

The IRS wants to ease concerns it sparked this summer over a looming crackdown on abusive employee-owned benefit plans.

An agency official Monday said tax regulators don’t intend to launch a wholesale audit of employee stock ownership plans, but will target only high-income employers that dodge paying taxable income by loaning it to their worker participants.

A notice (IR-2023-144) published in August led to concerns that the IRS was zeroing in on all employee-owned companies, Laura Warshawsky, a deputy associate chief counsel at the IRS, said at a virtual conference hosted by the American Bar Association’s tax ...