Tax Attorney in Pasadena, California

Yes, but only at the prime-contractor or sub level that bears economic risk and retains substantial rights. JPL is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center operated by Caltech under a NASA prime contract, so JPL personnel are Caltech employees and the Caltech entity is the §174 specified research expenditure taxpayer on its qualifying activity. Individual employees with W-2 wages from Caltech do not claim §41 on their own returns. If you moonlight as a 1099 consultant on classified Q-clearance work for a defense or aerospace prime that does retain the IP and economic risk, your sponsor may be in §41 territory. We do not need to see classified material to handle the audit; we work from the unclassified contract structure, your Form 6765, and the SOWs the IRS examiner already has.

Most Caltech honoraria and consulting payments arrive on a Form 1099-NEC or 1099-MISC and land on Schedule C with self-employment tax. Royalty splits run through Schedule E. Visiting researchers on a J-1 may receive a 1042-S subject to treaty positions on Form 8233. California sources this income to where the work is performed under R&TC §17951, so Pasadena work to a nonresident is taxable on a Form 540NR. If you tell us you're a postdoc, fellowship recipient, or a returned IRS notice on stipend characterization, we run §117 qualified scholarship versus §117(c) services-required analysis before responding.

Proposition 19 took effect February 16, 2021 and replaced Proposition 58. The old $1 million-of-assessed-value parent-child exclusion is gone for any property the child does not make their principal residence within one year of transfer. If the home was your parents' primary residence and you moved in and filed a homeowners' exemption claim within twelve months, you keep the Prop 13 base-year value (with a partial step-up if the fair market value exceeds the parent's factored base value by more than $1 million as indexed). If you missed the one-year window, the property reassesses to market value. There is a 60-day filing window from the Notice of Supplemental Assessment to file an Assessment Appeals Board application; we file the AAB-100 with the Clerk of the Board at 500 W Temple Street and litigate the value if the Assessor over-reached on market evidence.

Pasadena charges TOT under Municipal Code Chapter 4.44 on stays of 30 consecutive days or less. Airbnb and Vrbo have collection agreements with many California cities, but Pasadena requires the operator to register, hold a Short-Term Rental Permit, and file returns even when the platform remits. A platform collection agreement does not relieve you of the recordkeeping obligation, and the city audits operators for stays moved off-platform, stays mischaracterized as 31-day to escape TOT, and parking-tax compliance under the same title. If you got a deficiency notice, we challenge the assessment, document platform remittance with payout reports, and negotiate penalty waiver under reasonable-cause grounds.

Proposition 13 caps the ad valorem base rate at 1% of factored base-year value with a 2% annual cap on inflation. The number above 1% on your bill comes from voter-approved debt: Pasadena Unified School District general-obligation bonds, the Pasadena City College bond, the Metro sales-tax district, and county-wide measures. The blended effective rate in Pasadena typically lands around 1.20% to 1.30%, with parcel taxes and assessments stacked on top. Parcel taxes are not ad valorem and survive Prop 13. We do not appeal parcel taxes through the Assessment Appeals Board because those go to the levying district; we appeal the underlying assessed value, which is the only number Prop 13 governs.

San Marino is its own city with the 91108 ZIP, but the Los Angeles County Assessor still values it. The Notice of Assessment goes out in the spring; the regular roll filing window for an AAB application is July 2 through November 30. If you received a Supplemental Notice after the purchase or a change-in-ownership event, the deadline is 60 days from the mailing or postmark date, whichever is later. We file the AAB-100 application, lock in your decline-in-value evidence with comparable sales from the same neighborhood, and either negotiate with an Assessor representative pre-hearing or take the case to a Hearing Officer or three-member Board panel.

The CDTFA West Covina field office relocated to Diamond Bar in March 2024. Pasadena restaurants now route to Diamond Bar, with field auditors who travel to the business location for the actual records review. The audit will compare reported taxable sales to bank deposits, point-of-sale Z-tape totals, federal Schedule C gross receipts on Form 1040, and third-party data from Caviar, DoorDash, Toast, and Square. Common Pasadena restaurant pickups: misclassified to-go cold food (sales-tax exempt under §6359 if not consumed on premises) versus hot prepared food (taxable), tip-shifting onto the gross-sales line, and resale certificates from caterers. We respond to CDTFA Form 1296 information requests, sit the auditor with our client, and negotiate the proposed audit determination before it becomes a Notice of Determination.

Pasadena imposes a UUT under Chapter 4.56 of the Municipal Code on intrastate, interstate, and international telecommunications services, electricity, gas, water, and cable television. Whether streaming and over-the-top video fall inside the cable definition is the live question — the city's ordinance follows the federal Mobile Telecommunications Sourcing Act and pre-Internet Tax Freedom Act framework. Pure internet access is preempted by ITFA. Voice-over-IP and bundled fiber-plus-voice services are typically inside UUT scope. If a UUT auditor sent a letter to your business asking why your service-provider remittance dropped, we walk through the bundling allocations and ITFA carve-outs and respond before the city refers it to outside collections.

Section 1202 excludes up to $10 million (or 10x basis, whichever is greater) of gain on qualified small business stock held more than five years, issued by a C-corp with under $50 million in gross assets at issuance, in a qualified trade or business. Caltech spinouts in clean-tech, semiconductors, biotech, and aerospace usually qualify on the QSB test. The traps are: original-issue requirement (no buying from a founder secondary), the active business requirement (must keep using 80% of assets in the qualified business), and California conformity — California fully conformed to §1202 through tax year 2012, decoupled in 2013, and now does not allow the §1202 exclusion on the state return. So you may pay 0% federal but still owe California up to 13.3%. We model the federal-state split before you sign the closing and structure any rollover under §1045 if you do not have five years of holding.

If you're a W-2 employee of Disney Imagineering (Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development) and they pay you for the Rose Bowl float work as part of regular employment, the wage allocation follows your normal W-2 sourcing. If they paid you on a 1099-NEC because you took side-work designing or fabricating for the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association directly, that's Schedule C self-employment income sourced to where the work was performed under R&TC §17951. Float-fabrication work in Pasadena is Pasadena-sourced. If you live in another state, you file a Form 540NR and allocate. If the Tournament also reimbursed you on a 1099-MISC for materials, we reconcile that into Schedule C COGS so you don't double-count the income.

The Pasadena Business License Tax is owed if you do business inside the city limits, with rates set by NAICS-equivalent category under the Pasadena Municipal Code. ZIP codes do not match city limits — the 91104 and 91107 ZIPs include unincorporated LA County islands (Altadena, East Pasadena). If your work address is across the boundary, you owe an Los Angeles County business license or no city tax at all, but you may still owe state, federal, and CDTFA. We check the parcel against the city GIS, request a refund of overpaid Pasadena business license tax for the open four years under R&TC §19306, and re-register correctly with the County.

Section 1041 treats a transfer between spouses incident to divorce as a non-recognition event for federal income tax. California conforms. The receiving spouse takes carryover basis. For RSUs that have not vested, the assigned spouse becomes the responsible party for tax on vest if the RSU is transferable under the plan document; if it isn't, the employee-spouse remains taxable on vest and the divorce decree should require a tax-equalization payment. Pre-IPO QSBS adds §1202 holding-period and original-issue questions that don't tolerate sloppy decree language. We coordinate with family-law counsel to draft the §1041 transfer, the QDRO if a retirement account is involved, and the Form 8275 disclosure if positions are aggressive enough to need it.

California uses the closer-connection test under R&TC §17014 plus the Appeal of Stephen Bragg factors (2003-SBE-002, FTB OTA). Days outside California don't get you out by themselves. The FTB looks at where your spouse and dependent children live, where your home is, where your professional and social ties are, where your vehicles are registered, where you bank, where you vote, and where you intend to return. A Caltech faculty member on sabbatical with a Pasadena home, school-age children in Pasadena Unified, and a return ticket is almost always a resident. We've handled these — the better posture is part-year resident with cleanly sourced sabbatical income, not a clean-break nonresident claim that the FTB will defeat at Protest.

FBAR (FinCEN Form 114) requires reporting of foreign financial accounts with an aggregate value over $10,000 at any point in the year. Civil penalties run up to $10,000 per non-willful violation per account per year and 50% of account balance per willful violation per year, with criminal exposure for willful failure. The Streamlined Domestic Offshore Procedure is the right tool when the failure was non-willful. We've handled this for Caltech and JPL personnel with Swiss, Indian, Israeli, and Chinese accounts. The submission package is three years of amended returns plus six years of FBARs plus a non-willful certification on Form 14654; the 5% Title 26 miscellaneous offshore penalty is the only sanction. Get the package in before you receive an FBAR examiner letter — the program is closed once you're under exam.