Blog

By Nathan R. McGuire, Esq.

This article first appeared in The Communicator, Winter 2021. To read more, click here. 

For the last two legislative sessions, we have faced some of the most historically significant bills since the Davis-Stirling Act. And that’s saying a lot considering the Davis-Stirling Act has probably been amended more than a hundred times since it was enacted in 1986. This year was especially challenging on legislators, advocates, and citizens wishing to engage in the process, given the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the legislative process. It has also demonstrated the need for modernizing the Davis-Stirling Act by allowing for the use of mainstream technology, which has become commonplace in our everyday lives.

Because of the pandemic, the legislature shifted its focus to the coronavirus, economic recovery, and housing affordability issues. Other bills, like the ones pushed by CAI’s California Legislative Action Committee (CAI-CLAC), including a bill to clean...

By: Amy Davis

On a Thursday morning, I received the call that no daughter ever wants to receive. It was from my mom and her car was surrounded by fire. At the same time that I was taking my mom’s call, my dad and stepmom were sending me videos of several fires on the opposite side of town from where my mom was located. This was Paradise, California, November 8th, 2018.

November 11, 2018, I flew to Chico to be with family and friends and to help them with their insurance claims. Almost immediately, the question arose, “Can we just cut our losses and move?” The answer was an easy “yes.” Fortunately for survivors of the Camp Fire and future wildfire victims, California has passed several laws aimed at protecting persons whose interests are covered under insurance policies following a declared disaster.

Insureds whose homes are a total loss can now use a greater amount of their policies’ coverages to purchase an existing home or rebuild elsewhere. Prior to 2018, our California insurance...

By William S. Erlanger, CPA
Levy, Erlanger & Company LLP, CPAs 
(This article was previously printed in The Communicator, Volume 12, Issue 3) 

Not all homeowner associations file the same federal or state income and/or information returns. A homeowner association might be filing its federal income taxes on a Form 1120, Form 1120-H, Form 1120-H as a timeshare, Form 1120-C, Form 990 and/or Form 990-T. If that is not confusing enough, California also has different returns that a homeowner association might be using: Form 100, Form 199, and Form 109. 

California requires that homeowner associations electronically file all returns, while the IRS permits electronic filing, but only for certain returns. Oddly enough, while it requires electronic filing of returns, the state does allow mailing of checks for balance due or estimated taxes. The IRS, however, requires that almost all payments be made electronically.

Since Congress set about to tax corporations back in the 1900s, corporate tax re...