PA SPECIAL DEPRECIATION

In the process of answering (to the best of my limited ability) someone else's question about "special depn" vs "bonus depn" it suddenly struck me what the original questioner might mean.  That IRS nonsense about giving you 50% in the first year, or 100% in the first year but having nothing to do with Section 179 -- maybe that's what "special" means.

Whatever it is, the general rule is, if IRS giveth, Governor Rendell and/or Governor Corbett and/or whoever went before them and whoever will come later in time -- taketh away.  I'm still amazed that PA finally stopped taxing, in 1998, the capital gain on your primary residence.  But in general, if it's good at the Federal level, forget it for PA because it won't work.

I'm not positive, by the way, if C corporations don't actually get the good of the Federal depreciation "goodies."  But I know for sure that non-corporate PA returns go by "non-Federal" rules.  I don't remember if the original question had to do with C-Corps or didn't specify what type of taxpayer it was.

I'm going to assume Lacerte knows what they're doing.  If the taxpayer is a C-Corp., and Lacerte puts nothing extra onto the return because of some fancy depreciation deal the US Gov't gave, then leave it alone, it's right.  On all other modules, the PA Lacerte program will certainly either do an add-back if there's a line for it, or show a completely separate PA dep'n schedule that follows PA's rules.  I can't remember the format, and I don't care, because (a) I know that Lacerte does it right in the few instances where I leave it to default to Federal rules and then see what happens on the PA return, (b) I have virtually no C-Corps as clients, and (c) I usually force the Federal "goodies" down to the level of state "baddies" anyway, just so my clients will have the same level of dep'n on both returns.