What happens to retained earnings when you close a business? If a company has any retained earnings when it is 'closed' or dissolved, these automatically vest with the Crown in ance with Bona Vacantia. It is therefore essential that a company's assets are dealt with before a company is dissolved.
If your previous entity was a C-Corp, you should close out its retained earnings before the conversion. The negative retained earnings balance will be transferred to a new equity account in the S-Corp.
What Is the Accumulated Earnings Tax? The accumulated earnings tax is a 20% tax—or penalty—that the IRS imposes on corporations that retain "excessive" earnings. This usually comes in the form of holding on to business earnings instead of paying out dividends to avoid income taxes at the shareholder level.
The Accumulated Adjustments Account (AAA) tracks your S Corporation's gross income, expenses, and distributions. This account is found on Form 1120-S on Schedule M-2. The goal of the Accumulated Adjustment account is to determine if you took any taxable distributions during the year.
First, S corporations do not carry forward losses from one tax year to the next tax year; net business profits (income) and net business losses are passed through to the shareholder(s) on Line 1 of K-1 (1120-S) each tax year.
Your S corporation handles profits differently from traditional corporations. Here's what makes it special: Rather than keeping a standard retained earnings account, S corporations use something called an Accumulated Adjustments Account (AAA) to track profits that haven't been distributed to shareholders.
Current E&P represents the current economic income computed on an annual basis. Accumulated E&P represents the sum of each year's current E&P reduced by distributions.