If you’re like a lot of small businesses, you might have experienced a business loss for the 2009 tax year. You may actually be able to make money off of this fact if you were more fortunate (ie, made money) in years previous to 2009.A CNN.com interview with tax adviser Keith Hall has the information on this:

Hall: Perhaps the most important thing unique to this year is there are so many businesses which were affected by the downturn in the economy, that the IRS has expanded opportunities for loss carrybacks.

The definition of a loss carryback is if you had losses from your business in 2009, then you may have the opportunity to then take those losses and offset income from previous years.

That’s certainly something to look into if you had a tough year for 2009, because it may give you the ability to recover taxes in more years — namely five — than you used to be able to, which is just two. So if that’s the situation that you find yourself in, certainly look into options for those loss carrybacks.

You can find more information on this in the IRS Publication 536. More of the CNN interview with Keith Hall can be found here.