IRS Increases Tangible Property Expensing Threshold to $2,500

Small business gets a filing and recordkeeping tax break, as the de minimis safe harbor property expensing threshhold gets raised from $500 to $2,500, for tax years beginning after January 1, 2016.  This means that businesses will on an annual basis now be able to make the safe harbor election to expense all acquisitions of property less than $2,500 (they must use the same expense policy for bookkeeping purposes as they do for tax purposes and they must have this policy in place as of the beginning of their tax year).

The following link to the IRS website goes into greater detail about this change.  This is a highly significant change, as a large portion of business related investments in technology and other assets fall between the $500 and $2,500 threshhold, so effectively this allows small businesses to directly expense a much larger percentage of their capital expenditures in the year the capital assets are purchased (i.e. they no longer have to capitalize them as fixed assets and depreciate them over several years).