This Tax Day, Some Truckers are Unhappy with Trump [View all]

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This Tax Day, Some Truckers are Unhappy with Trump
The 2017 tax overhaul is hitting long distance drivers with unexpected bills.
Hannah Levintova


Last month, Dennis Bridges, a CPA who runs an accounting firm just north of Atlanta, had to break bad news to a client. Bridges specializes in doing taxes for truck drivers around the country, and this tax season he’s had to tell dozens of truckers that after years of being able to count on receiving tax refunds that they in fact would owe thousands of dollars. This particular client from New York owed $4,000. It could have been worse: about 20 percent of Bridges’ trucking clients have owed more than $5,000.

When Bridges’ firm called the driver to deliver the news, the line first went silent. Then the driver “went into a panic,” Bridges recalls. “He was just asking, ‘Where on earth am I going to get the money to pay this thing?'” For years, he had received an annual refund in the ballpark of $1,500.

“I thought Trump was giving us a tax cut. And where the heck is it?”

“They got screwed,” says Kevin Rutherford, a small fleet owner who hosts Trucking Business and Beyond, a daily satellite radio show, and also runs an accounting service geared to drivers. After the tax bill became law in late 2017, Rutherford asked his clients and radio listeners for their 2017 and projected 2018 tax data. Using their numbers, he ran about 50 scenarios, finding that for “most company drivers, losing the per diem would mean they’re going to pay more tax.” Only a handful of scenarios came “close or about even” to the filers’ past returns. “It depends on how many kids they have and a couple other things, but for the most part, it was a pretty big loss,” he says.

Trucking is a popular vocation, employing about 3.5 million drivers nationwide, making it, by some counts, the most common job in 29 states. While all but three of those states went to Donald Trump in 2016, the tax overhaul enacted by the president and the GOP Congress in 2017 hit American truck drivers hard by stripping a key exemption for dining and living expenses while on the road. Millions of long-haul drivers employed by trucking companies are finding themselves slapped with massive and unexpected tax bills, according to accountants, professional trucking associations, and drivers.

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https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/04/trump-tax-bill-truckers-truck-drivers-deduction/