Michael Cupps discusses remote working, the four-day workweek and the future of office space. Tenant and Landlord Attorney Todd RothBard talks about Pandemic relief for landlords and tenants and where it’s headed.

Episode Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to the Practical Tax podcast, with tax attorney Steve Moskowitz. The Practical Tax podcast is brought to you by Moskowitz, LLP, a tax law firm.

Disclaimer:

The information contained in this podcast is based upon information available as of date of recording and will not be updated for changes in law regulation. Any information is not to be considered tax advice or legal advice and does not form an attorney/client relationship. Further, this podcast may be construed as attorney advertising. You should see professional consultation for your individual tax and legal situation.

Chip Franklin:

Welcome to Practical Tax. I'm Chip Franklin. That is Steve Moskowitz, tax attorney. Steve, this is fascinating where we are right now in the post pandemic world and the remote working and people kind of trickling back in. I know you are making a move for your employees to be better for them and safer and a new location. What's your experience with some of your clients and everybody else? Is remote working going to hang in there or is it starting to go away?

Steve Moskowitz:

Oh, no. Remote working is alive and well and will be with us for the rest of our lives. A lot of people prefer as a matter of fact, I've seen surveys where a lot of employees said, if I can't work remotely for you, I'll work remotely for somebody else. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense because how much time do you spend commuting? First of all, you could use that time to work more or to play more, not to mention the cost of commuting, not to mention you go into the office, you're wearing your fancy duds. If you're at home, you're probably in jammies or sweats, not to mention, how about all those people that have kids and are either home to take care of the kids or close to school. If something happens, you can run right to school as opposed to being in the corporate world.

And even if you left, as soon as you got the phone call, it would take you a while to get to the school. So it's an awful lot of advantages. And another thing is that for example, here in San Francisco, a lot of people have left San Francisco and said, well, why should they pay a lot of money for a small, not so hot apartment when they can move to another state, buy a house for what they were paying for rent and also maybe move to a state, doesn't even have an income tax. Not to mention people that say, "Well, I can go to a resort area and work from there." Not to mention all the countries that are saying, "Hey, we'll give you a special visa, come and work in our country. We just like you to stay here and spend some money in our hotels and our restaurants."

Chip Franklin:

I think I read somewhere, Steve, like 75,000 American professionals moved to Barcelona last year and they're working from Barcelona. And many of them from California.

Steve Moskowitz:

Well, talk about moving. If you move to Puerto Rico, you can legally avoid most of your federal taxes.

Chip Franklin:

Well, let's talk a little bit about that with an expert. Michael Cupps is from ActiveOps and these guys, they know this cold and he's nice enough to join us here. Michael, obviously you heard this conversation. It seemed like we were moving towards the possibility of a four-day work week, but then it kind of got flipped with the pandemic where people are working remote. First of all, do you concur with Steve that this is here to stay?

Michael Cupps:

Oh, absolutely. We see it in our customers and they're the biggest banks and insurance companies on the globe. And they're as much as they try, they're not those employees aren't coming back.

Chip Franklin:

That should be good for the business, right? I mean guys, right, it's good for everybody, it seems.

Michael Cupps:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. When they actually sit and think about what that can do, whether it's real estate or their access to new employees, that they can go recruit in areas they wouldn't be recruiting before, poaching from a competitor. All of those things are now at their discretion.

Chip Franklin:

There's got to be downsides though. There are psychological downsides, and then of course I would imagine managing remote employees is a new challenge.

Michael Cupps:

It is, and it isn't. We've had customers like Anthem Healthcare, for example. They were remote before the pandemic and they just kind of sailed through the pandemic without change. It comes down to teaching your leaders and teaching your managers how to handle it. It's a different environment. Doesn't mean it's any less productive or more productive. It just means it's different. And some of those managers that grew up going to the office every day, it's tough to get them to see it a different way. So it's important to get those managers retrained and skilled in a way that they now know how to engage the employees the right way.

Chip Franklin:

Do you guys know the story of Anthem and how they grew? This is a company that just changed the way medical billing is done. And they did it by hiring somebody on the sixth level, not on the top, but their whole business plan was the people that really know how to make this stuff work aren't upstairs, they're down on the bottom floor. And they went and they found this woman who was doing all the medical billing and was talking about all the problems with it. And so a few companies started handle it on the efficiency and everything grew from that. It is interesting. I wonder with remote employees, do you get that kind of hey, can I stop and talk to you for a minute? I have an idea. It seems to be that that might be a little bit of a problem as well. And Steve, I'm going to ask you as well, because you have tons of associates. When you don't see them face-to-face, is something lost in that?Let me ask you, Steve first.

Steve Moskowitz:

When you talk about face-to-face, we have Zoom. So it is kind of face-to-face and you have to weigh everything else, advantages and disadvantages, where you can do an awful lot through Zoom. And what about when you have employees on the other side of the world? What about when somebody really can't leave their home for some reason, they have small children. What about all the people that you can do business with now that wouldn't have before? For example, now people really don't mind that you're thousands of miles from them. Everybody's gotten so used to it. A client can calls us from Florida and say, "Hi, Steve. I'd like you to help with my taxes." And doesn't matter that I'm in California.

Chip Franklin:

But I guess it depends on the business, right, Michael?

Michael Cupps:

Yeah. Yeah. Certainly-/p>

Steve Moskowitz:

It also, Chip, could depend on the person, because some people are just happier in their homes. Other people want to go and physically be with somebody. It's a difference between being able to shake hands with somebody or not. But again, even shaking hands today, some people don't believe in doing that anymore.

Chip Franklin:

Well, in the middle of all this, I was a standup comic. I've been since 1980, and I did a comedy show for The Punchline in a Zoom thing like this. Let me tell you, it was unsatisfying to say the least. There are some things, obviously that salespeople will tell you that, medical sales, I got to come in. You got to see it in my hands. I got to talk to you. Those kind of relationships. Let me talk about the four-day work week. Is that dead now because everybody's at home? Are they going to give them a Friday off?

Michael Cupps:

No, it's actually picking up steam again. There was this an experiment going on in the UK with about 700 companies trying it out to see how it plays out. And then there'll be results of that study. It's not complete yet, but it's actually I think catching more steam than it was before the pandemic, mainly because people now realize that they can work flexibly and it doesn't have to be a Friday that everybody gets off. It could be 20% of your work population gets Monday off and the other 20%, Friday, and then Wednesday, et cetera. So with flex schedules the way they are, the way we learn to work from home or work remotely, it actually is more convenient now.

Steve Moskowitz:

And with other things too, like email. In the old days, if you wanted to speak to somebody, you both had to be available at the same time to speak together. Now somebody can send an email at three o'clock in the morning and somebody can answer it at 11 o'clock at night and they've communicated. They didn't have to be together at the same time.

Chip Franklin:

Hopefully you remember to turn the notification off on your iPhone. So it doesn't ding at three in the morning. I get that all the time. What about the financial incentives for a company to go to a four-day work week when they're already remote? Steve, are there some financial incentives there? Obviously you're still paying for health, salary, all the disability, all the stuff, workman's comp, all that stuff. Does it really benefit a corporation to go four days in your mind?

Steve Moskowitz:

The benefit is what are we talking about with employee satisfaction? And somebody says, "You know, boss, I'd really be happier with you and the job if I could work four days a week. I'll work the same number of hours." It depends on the person. Somebody would rather stretch it out and say, "Look, maybe their endurance isn't as great. And they would just rather have five days." Someone say, "Well look, I would rather work four days, 10 hours." And that was always a big thing with people that had a long commute, they'd say, "Wow, I don't have to spend half the day commuting,