The New York Times this week reported on the issues facing Colorado’s legal marijuana business when it comes to federal taxes:

“Money was pouring into Bruce Nassau’s five Colorado marijuana shops when his accountant called with the bad news: The 2014 tax season was approaching, and Mr. Nassau could not rely on the galaxy of deductions that other businesses use to reduce their tax bills. He was going to owe the Internal Revenue Service a small fortune.

“I had to write a check for $275,000,” Mr. Nassau said. “Unbelievable.”

The country’s rapidly growing marijuana industry has a tax problem. Even as more states embrace legal marijuana, shops say they are being forced to pay crippling federal income taxes because of a decades-old law aimed at preventing drug dealers from claiming their smuggling costs and couriers as business expenses on their tax returns.

Congress passed that law in 1982 after a cocaine and methamphetamine dealer in Minneapolis who had been jailed on drug charges went to tax court to argue that the money he spent on travel, phone calls, packaging and even a small scale should be considered tax write-offs. The provision, still enforced by the I.R.S., bans all tax credits and deductions from “the illegal trafficking in drugs.”

Marijuana business owners say it prevents them from deducting their rent, employee salaries or utility bills, forcing them to pay taxes on a far larger amount of income than non-marijuana businesses with the same earnings and costs. They also say the taxes, which apply to medical and recreational sellers alike, are stunting their hiring, or even threatening to drive them out of business.

The issue reveals a growing chasm between the 23 states, plus the District of Columbia, that allow medical or recreational marijuana and the federal bureaucracy, which includes national forests in Colorado where possession is a federal crime, federally regulated banks that turn away marijuana businesses and the halls of the I.R.S.

Colorado businesses challenge the IRS in tax court

Like banking limitations that expose legal marijuana businesses to extraordinary risks and encourage violent crime by creating piles of cash, the federal tax rules grossly penalizes those trying to end the black market:

The tax rule, an obscure provision referred to as 280E, catches many marijuana entrepreneurs by surprise, often in the form of an audit notice from the I.R.S. Some marijuana businesses in Colorado, California and other marijuana-friendly states have challenged the I.R.S. in tax court.

This year, Allgreens, a marijuana shop in Colorado, successfully challenged an I.R.S. policy that imposed about $30,000 in penalties for paying its payroll taxes in cash — common in an industry in which businesses rely on armed guards and cash-stuffed safes because they cannot get bank accounts.

A normal business, for example, might pay a 30 percent federal rate on its taxable income, which would represent its gross income minus deductible business expenses. A marijuana business, on the other hand, might pay the same federal rate on all of its gross income because it cannot take these deductions. The difference can raise the rate on a marijuana business to 70 percent or more of its profits.

Ms. Gillette said she represented a dispensary owner who had taken in $1.7 million last year before expenses and had received a tax bill of $866,000. They are negotiating with tax officials, she said.

Colorado and a handful of other states have changed their tax laws to let legal marijuana businesses take deductions on their state returns. And this month, Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Earl Blumenauer, both Democrats of Oregon, which legalized recreational marijuana last year, introduced legislation that would allow marijuana businesses that are following their states’ legalization laws to take regular deductions on their federal returns.

The current system, he said, encourages marijuana sellers to file tax returns that do not follow the law and simply hope the I.R.S. does not spot them.

Accountants and tax lawyers, who are inundated with calls from marijuana shops these days, say the rules are murky and make little sense. If marijuana retailers dedicate parts of their stores to yoga, drug education or selling non-drug merchandise, can they deduct part of their rent? If employees split their time between cleaning the store and selling marijuana, are their salaries partly deductible?

The wording of the tax laws and their interpretation since states began to legalize medical marijuana has allowed businesses to deduct the expenses of wholesale marijuana or growing the plant, from the price of the seeds or baby plants to the water and growing lights needed to produce it. Only when retailers go to sell those buds, brownies or marijuana-infused drinks do the tax restrictions kick in.

“It is the last domino that has to fall for us to be treated like any other business in the country,” said Tim Cullen, a co-owner of five marijuana shops in Colorado. “We’re not a black-market cocaine dealer. We’re totally on board and on the level. We’d like to be treated as such.”

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