The Department of Justice finally got around to rescheduling medical marijuana from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3. This move was expected and had been announced months earlier, but apparently today was the day they actually pulled the trigger. https://www.perplexity.ai/discover/you/doj-reclassifies-medical-marij-XBkEeImYRvOor5icFKLbMg So why am I writing about it here in the Tax Strategy Network? What a lot of people not in the tax business don't understand is that Schedule I activities are not legal for federal tax purposes. And there's a regulation called Section 280E that limits the tax deductibility of everything except for the cost of goods sold. So if you had a dispensary retail store that was legal in your state and you had a thousand dollars worth of sales, you were only permitted to deduct the cost of goods related to that thousand dollars, which might be three hundred dollars worth of costs. The other expenses that you have for operating the business were non-deductible. So your store rent, your utilities, your payroll costs for running the retail arm of the business: all of those were expenses that you were not able to deduct, and so you were, in effect, paying taxes on money that you had already spent. With this rescheduling change that releases the restrictions from Section 280E and allows for the deduction of those operating expenses. The net result is that the tax bills for these kinds of businesses are going to go down dramatically. It's a great example of how carve-out legislation can alter the tax position of something that might not be apparent from a first glance. The tax code is filled with carve-out language, and it's part of the job of tax strategy to figure out which of these apply to which situations and take as best advantage of it as possible.

Watch live or the recording afterwards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0xMwMJdCkk

One of the hardest skills to train is to recognize when things are wrong. We just had a case with a client where a person had a big sale of stock and according to the 1099 the basis was extremely low. Now if you were to look at the actual document, it would just be a straightforward calculation, and there will be a huge Gate and a lot of taxes that are owed. The whole thing made my Spidey senses tingle. The stock has the same name as the company that the client was working for. There are many ways to acquire a company stock. The most common ways are as RSU’s or employee stock purchase plans. Both of those methods have costs associated with them. Some brokerages do a really bad job of tracking RSU stock because when an employee gets the stock awards as part of their payroll compensation, the shares are transferred into the employees brokerage account and not purchased inside the brokerage account. So the broker has no idea what the cost basis for those transactions really are. Some brokers will report a supplemental information page about basis adjustments and so don’t. In this case, the broker reported that there were covered transactions meaning that they are reporting the basis to the IRS, but it still looked really wrong to my eyes. So we reached out to the client to confirm whether or not this was actually correct. As it turns out my Spidey senses were correct and they did have call spaces and they sent over a sheet with all of their purchases and instead of having a $200,000 gain they in fact had a loss. It just makes me wonder in the genic AI age that we are heading into, will these kinds of errors be caught?

I've run into two client situations in the last couple of days that hit Section 461 excess business loss limitations. What this limit does, and which was made permanent by the one big beautiful bill, Act of 2025, is that if you have business losses and non-business income, there is a limit. I'm just going to round $300,000 for single filers and $500,000 for joint filers in terms of losses that you can take against the non-business income. If you have a big income event, let's say your W-2 is $1,000,000 and you have a $500,000 business loss, if you're joint then your net income is going to be the $500,000. You're going to pay taxes based on that. If you are a single filer, you're only going to get $300,000 of deductions. The remaining $200,000 will roll over into the future years as a net operating loss carry forward and you're going to pay taxes on $200,000 that you don't have. The character of income and losses does matter and this is yet another example of that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClXdAooQq_Y If anyone wants to hop on: https://riverside.com/studio/neal-mcspaddens-studio?t=cb556e679c1895f4dea4