The Heavy Vehicle Use Tax is a tax on vehicles weighing 55,000 pounds or more that is distributed to state governments to pay for road and construction projects.
It is required that all companies that employ these types of vehicles on public roads file tax form 2290.
Although initially it may seem like a burden, using a vehicle template to upload the data about your trucks makes the process a lot simpler.
A vehicle template is an Excel file that, when filled out properly, can be used to upload vehicle data into the 2290 e-file system.
It contains nine fields that are used to supply the necessary information about each vehicle in your fleet.
The fields are Unit Number, Year, Make, VIN, Gross Vehicle Registered Rate, Last Filing Date, Logging Vehicle?, Did Vehicle Travel Greater than 5,000 Miles?, and Agricultural Vehicle?.
The first field, Unit Number, is the unique number that is assigned to the vehicle.
The next four fields describe and identify the vehicle.
Be sure to have the right VIN for each vehicle, as mistakes in these fields will delay acceptance of the form.
The Last Filing Date field refers to the last date that tax was paid on the vehicle.
The Logging Vehicle? field is used to specify whether or not the vehicle was used by the Forest Department for carrying tree logs.
The next field is used to indicate if the vehicle had traveled more than 5,000 miles during that tax period (or 7,500 miles for agricultural vehicles).
Any vehicle that traveled less than 5,000 miles is exempt from the tax, so it is important to know the number of miles traveled.
The final field is used to indicate if the vehicle is used primarily for farming purposes.
Using the vehicle template makes filing your form 2290 easy to do online by uploading your truck data into the IRS electronic filing system.
It is a good idea to keep up with this data anyway, so if you are organized with your record keeping, then filling out the vehicle template will be a snap.