This feels like a great way to get audited by the IRS. It does not feel like sound advice.

So the advice here is (from my understanding, not a tax lawyer) sound, but it is "unsound-adjacent" -- so a lot of people will start from this basic understanding and then go off into crazytown.

So like influencers get to hear other influencers explaining this "you can reinvest your profits and then you won't have profits" type of advice... but then they will put it right next to unsound advice about "by the way, a great way is to invest in a "business" trip to Greece to sail the Mediterranean, it is "team-building" between you and your spouse and kids who are all employees of your little influencer company, oh by the way you should buy fancy watches so that you can show them off in your videos, and get a very expensive hairstylist to do your hair -- as long as you make a video about it!"

And it's like, no, the tax courts actually have procedures they follow to determine if those things are personal expenses or business expenses and 90% of the advice that you hear here are some form of tax fraud.

But from the point of view of a company, as the tax year comes to an end you hopefully have extra money left in the bank, now you can either use it to buy things that the company needs and thus grow the company, or you can hold onto it where if you're a C-corp the government will take 21% of the year-on-year delta, or you can pay it back to the shareholders as a dividend and they pay 15% capital gains tax on it. (And of course you don't have to dump the whole account into just one bucket, you can choose how much goes into each of the three.) And when it gives the advice "pssst, you should probably reinvest most of it," that's a standard practice explicitly sanctioned by the government.

I don't know if you're right or wrong, but it is an incredibly common tactic and done all the time by many businesses and people. There are of course ways to do this that are less noticeable by the IRS (as acknowledged in the article) and it doesn't seem like they have the capacity to investigate and audit the vast amount of this practice. My understanding is they are typically focused on fraud and/or folks simply not filing.

All of these techniques are entirely routine for the average company with even a semi decent accountant, and only marginally increase the chance of an audit.

You do have to be sure you follow the rules and avoid various gotchas that other people in this section have pointed out, but otherwise it is entirely legal and routine.

I'm getting very strong sarcastic vibes from the article.