Reemployment Tax Webinar for Florida Businesses

Interested in learning more about Florida’s reemployment tax (previously known as “unemployment tax”)?  The Florida Department of Revenue is offering a free webinar to Florida businesses called “Florida Reemployment Tax Basics:  Foundation for Your Success.”

The webinar is July 18, 2017 from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. (Eastern Time).  The presenters are long-time Department of Revenue employees who are experts in reemployment.  Some of the topics they will cover in the webinar are:

  • Florida requirements and your responsibilities
  • Reemployment tax rates
  • How to file your RT-6 and pay reemployment taxes electronically
  • The difference between employees and independent contractors
  • Records you need to keep

To participate in the webinar, you will need access to a computer so that you can view the presentation.  To register, please click here.

Back-to-School Sales Tax Holiday is August 4th – August 6th

If your business sells clothes, footwear, certain accessories, school supplies, or personal computers, the upcoming Back-to-School Sales Tax Holiday will affect your business.  For 3 days in August, these items will be exempt from the state sales tax if they meet certain price restrictions.

Here are some details about this year’s tax-free shopping days:

  • The tax-free days will run from 12:01 a.m. on Friday, August 4th through midnight on Sunday, August 6th.
  • Items that will be tax-free are:
    • Clothing, footwear, and accessories like wallets and purses selling for $60 or less
    • School supplies selling for $15 or less per item
    • Personal computers such as e-readers, laptops, tablets, etc., and computer-related accessories like keyboards, modems, etc., selling for $750 or less.

Retailers are not required to keep additional or special records for the tax-free days.  Sales of eligible items that are sold tax-free from August 4th through August 6th should be reported as exempt sales on your sales tax return for that period.

Businesses that sell only a small number of items covered by the sales tax holiday are allowed to opt out of participating in the holiday.  To opt out, a business must:

  • Have less than 5% of its gross sales attributable to items included in the sales tax holiday,
  • Notify the Department of Revenue in writing by August1st, and
  • Post a notice where customers can see it that the business has opted out of the sales tax holiday and will be collecting sales tax on these items.

The Florida Department of Revenue will provide a detailed Tax Information Publication to all active registered sales tax dealers explaining:

  • A detailed list of items that are tax-free and which ones are taxable during the holiday
  • What to do when a product contains both exempt and taxable items
  • How to deal with gift certificates
  • How to handle exchanges of tax exempt purchases after the tax-free days are over
  • How to do refunds during/after the tax free days

If you are a retail business and have questions about the Back-to-School Sales Tax Holiday, you can call the Department of Revenue’s toll-free Taxpayer Services line at 800-352-3671, or click here for more detailed information on the 2017 Back-to-School Sales Tax Holiday or here for a list of frequently asked questions.

Know How to Protect Your Company’s Computers & Networks

This past May, hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide were infected with a ransomware cyberattack. The “Wannacry” virus was the biggest ransomware outbreak in history affecting over 150 countries, and its effect is still not fully known.

With criminal hackers releasing new strains of ransomware that spread automatically across all workstations in a network, it is very important that employers take steps to protect their business computers and networks from cyber-attacks.Here are a couple of tips to help protect your computers and network.  You should educate all employees to:

  • Avoid clicking on suspicious links contained in emails.  One way to tell if the link is bad is to hover your mouse over the link to see if the website that pops up matches the name in the link.
  • Be wary of visiting unsafe or unreliable sites.
  • Never click on a link that you do not trust on a web page or in Facebook or messaging applications such as “Whats App” and other applications.
  • Confirm with friends and colleagues if they receive a message from them with a link before clicking on the link (infected machines send random messages with links).
  • Keep all business files backed up regularly and periodically.
  • Beware of fraudulent e-mail messages that use names similar to popular services such as “PayePal” instead of PayPal or use popular names that are just slightly misspelled.
  • Use anti-virus software and always make sure all the latest updates have been installed.
  • Make sure the Windows version running on their computers have the most recent updates installed.
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