Small Partnership Returns—Failure-to-File Penalties

An Letter Ruling (SCA) 200135029, the IRS advised that it may change its administrative procedures to alleviate the impact of Sec. 6698, failure-to-file penalties on small partnership returns.

Under Sec. 6698, partnerships that fail to timely file a complete partnership return as required by Sec. 6031(a) are subject to a penalty. However, the Service does not assess a penalty if the taxpayer can show that the failure to file was due to reasonable cause. Reasonable cause is a condition under which an ordinarily intelligent person would act under similar circumstances.

Small partnerships (i.e., 10 or fewer partners) often do not file partnership returns; rather, each partner files a detailed statement of his share of partnership income and deductions with his own return. In such a situation, the legislative history to Sec. 6698 indicated that full reporting of partnership income and deductions by each partner was adequate and that it was reasonable not to file a partnership return.

Based on these facts and the legislative history, SCA 200135029 suggested that taxpayers answer the following six questions:

1. Is the partnership a domestic partnership?

2. Does the partnership have 10 or fewer partners (husband and wife and their estates are treated as one partner)?

3. Are all partners natural persons (other than a nonresident alien) or an estate of a deceased partner?

4. Is each of the partner's shares of each partnership item the same as his share of every other item?

5. Have all of the partners timely filed their income tax returns?

6. Have all of the partners fully reported their share of the partnership's income, deductions and credits on their timely filed income tax returns?

If the taxpayer can answer "yes" to all of the above questions, the Service would abate any failure-to-file penalty for partnerships. This definitely helps clarify this issue and should help small partnerships avoid failure-to-file penalties.

From Jeremy Sperring, CPA, Frazier & Deeter, LLC, Atlanta, GA