I’m Justin Smiley, an Enrolled Agent in San Diego. I keep the books and file the returns for flying clubs and aircraft owners, nonprofits with restricted funds, and small businesses that would rather know where they stand.
Free, 30 minutes, written summary either way.
That’s usually how people find me, and it’s a perfectly good way to start. The Enrolled Agent credential comes from the IRS itself and it’s all tax, which means I can prepare your return and, if a letter ever turns up about it, deal with the IRS on your behalf rather than wishing you luck. Published fees from $395, and you’ll know the number before I start.
Partnerships and partner basis, nonprofit clubs and the 990, leasebacks, flight schools and independent CFIs, and the depreciation question your salesman answered wrong. I’m the treasurer of an aircraft partnership, so I’ve closed these books from the inside.
AviationRestricted and unrestricted. Grant tracking that holds up when the funder asks. Functional expense allocation, a board packet people can actually read, and the 990. Restricted funds and grant reporting have been my day job for twenty years, in public education.
NonprofitsMonthly books, quarterly estimates, and a return prepared by the same person who kept the books. Priced separately, payable monthly, which is the only way the August decisions get made in August.
Small Business
You buy a $150,000 airplane and put it on leaseback with a flight school. For aircraft acquired after January 19, 2025, 100% bonus depreciation is back, and permanent under current law, so the pitch is simple: deduct the whole thing in year one.
The deduction is real. The problem is what you can use it against.
For most leaseback owners, the airplane is a passive activity under §469. Either it’s a rental activity, which is passive no matter how many hours you put in, or it’s a business you don’t materially participate in, which ends up in the same place. Passive losses offset passive income. If your income is wages, or a business you actively run, there’s nothing there to offset. So the deduction doesn’t disappear. It sits suspended, sometimes for years, until you have passive income to use it against or you sell the airplane.
Then there’s §280F, the tax code’s extra rules for airplanes, cars and other things people use partly for fun. Business use has to be more than half of the airplane’s total use in the first year to get bonus depreciation at all, and leasing it to your own company or a relative generally doesn’t count as business use (airplanes get a narrow exception). Fall to half or below in a later year and you switch to slow, straight-line depreciation and give back the extra you already took, as ordinary income.
None of this makes a leaseback a bad idea. It makes it a structuring question with a right answer and several expensive wrong ones, and the answer depends on facts that exist before you sign.
General information using current law, simplified. Your facts change the answer.
The leaseback problemIt’s a bit like taking a car in. You can describe the noise over the phone, but nobody quotes the repair until they’ve had the hood up. Your prior return and your current books tell me more in ten minutes than an hour of conversation will, which is why I ask for them before we talk instead of after. No books? That’s fine. A return or a letter from the IRS can get us started.
I’ve spent twenty years in California community college administration, and I still work there. A lot of that time has been spent on budgets where the money came with rules attached and the auditors actually showed up. Somewhere along the way I sat for the Enrolled Agent exam, because the tax code turned out to be the part I liked.
Every return I file, I prepare. Every set of books I keep, I close. When I’m not doing either, there’s a decent chance I’m somewhere over the desert with a headset on.
More about meA club that skips its annual return three years running loses its exempt status automatically. Reinstatement paths exist, and the right one depends on the facts.
Form 8868 gives a club six more months to file, but it does not extend the time to pay any tax owed on unrelated business income.
Volunteer treasurers rotate. Here is where a club’s records, logins, filings and deadlines should live so the handoff does not break anything.
Free, 30 minutes, written summary either way. Bring your books, your last return, or a notice you don’t understand.
