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Does the per diem calculation depend on my company per diem reimbursement?
Pilots and flight attendants may wonder if EZPerDiem.com knows what their per diem reimbursement is from their airline or company. When a flight crewmember pays for the EZStandard service, EZPerDiem.com does not know what that amount is. EZStandard is designed to compute the M&IE expenses, making it easy for you, your tax preparer, or your tax software package to prepare your taxes.
The EZPremium service, however, goes further than the EZStandard service in that we will prepare a complete IRS Form 2106 for you. In order to do that, EZPerDiem.com needs more information than it does for the EZStandard option. Basically, EZPremium needs to know what a crewmember's non-taxable per diem amount was, plus the additional employee business expenses that the crewmember may have, that are related to that specific aviation job. Those employee business expenses are entered via the Expense Processor.
The per diem reimbursement information (non-taxable per diem) should be on your W-2 Box 12, Code "L".
IMPORTANT DISTINCTION: The government's standard meal allowance you are entitled to does not depend on your company's per diem reimbursement, but your actual per diem deduction does depend on the reimbursement because your per diem from your company is subtracted from the meal allowance to (in part) determine the deductible amount.
That may sound confusing, so the following is a simple example to clarify this FAQ: Assume a hypothetical situation where a FedEx pilot, a Continental flight attendant, and an Ameristar Jet Charter pilot all had identical layovers on the same nights for the entire year and, furthermore, they had the same tax homes. Of course this is an impossible situation, but it conveys the point very well. In that situation, those three flight crew members would all have exactly the same looking calculations for their meal expenses (I.E. they would each have the same EZPerDiem.com per diem calculation).
However, on IRS Form 2106, the reimbursement from their companies would cause their per diem deductions to differ. Assume their meal expenses came out to $7500 each. Assume the FedEx pilot was reimbursed $6500, the Continental flight attendant was reimbursed $5300, and the Ameristar Jet Charter pilot was reimbursed $4700. The Amersistar pilot would have the highest per diem deduction because he got less per diem reimbursement from his company than the other two.
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