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ANOTHER COMMENT ON HIDING RESIDENTIAL AND COMMERCIAL SUBSCRIBERS FROM TAX PERSPECTIVE
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Ken
    In response to Gene at Reliable from the Sept 7 2015 article:
    “I am often requested by my residential customers to bill their business for their monitoring and installation fees.”  
    Yes many alarm companies at the request of the customer bill the business for residential use.  But we all know or should know that the alarm company that does this is aiding and abetting to assist the customer in avoiding IRS and State taxes by swinging a residential nondeductible expense to a deductible business expense.  
    Now the question for the attorney to answer is: can the alarm company be held liable and prosecuted for this?  Is it moral and ethical?(attorney, don’t answer the last question)
Leo
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RESPONSE
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    You have a residential subscriber who tells you to bill a business, which in turn pays you.  Is this aiding and abetting tax evasion?  Will you be liable and to whom?  And what about the moral and ethical issues?
    You have no liability to any taxing authority.  You are not engaged in tax evasion.  You have no idea how your residential or commercial subscribers handle their tax obligations or reporting.  Maybe the subscriber is declaring the alarm payments as personal income.  You are not responsible for how someone else deals with their taxes and you have no reason to ask what the relationship is between your residential subscriber and the entity that is being billed and paying you, at least not as far as your concern that you might become an IRS target.
    But there might be other reasons for you to question that billing arrangement.  What happens if you bill and get paid from a corporation, knowing that your alarm services are being performed at a residence, not at the entity's business, and that business subsequently goes bankrupt.  A Bankruptcy Trustee may decide to look into the payments and might claim that the entity received no consideration for its payments, and that might be the case.  The trustee would then demand a refund of all money paid during the statute of limitation period [6 years in NY].  You won't be very happy returning that money.  Perhaps not an everyday occurrence, but something worth considering.
    This issue started with the problem created for the police when subscriber locations are mischaracterized as residential or commercial, causing confusion to responding officers.  I don't think the PD cares who you bill, only how you identify the subscriber on dispatch.
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SMOKE DETECTOR COMMENT
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Ken
    I mostly like what this Marty Winger has to say [Sept 8 2015 article]. There is a tendency to treat fire protection as if it's comparable to figuring trajectories to Mars. It's good for business but let's get real. I know where smoke sensors go and building electrical inspectors verify installation from start to finish. So if there are dodos out there installing fire protection then the inspection process will catch the errors.
Dennis