Your local Silicon Valley tax accountant

Silicon Valley Tax has operated in San Jose since before most of the firms it competes with were incorporated. Our office at 2051 Junction Ave, Suite 200, sits in the North San Jose corridor, a short drive from Cisco's campus, Adobe's San Jose headquarters tower, and the Santana Row office cluster where PayPal and a cluster of fintech companies keep their teams. That proximity is not a branding point. It is how we know the specific equity plan structures, vesting schedules, and payroll withholding patterns at each of those employers well enough to catch the problems before they turn into April surprises.

San Jose is California's third-largest city and the economic engine of the South Bay. With a median home value that has crossed $1.4 million, a dense small-business corridor spread across Eastside, Japantown, Willow Glen, and Berryessa, and a tech-employer roster that runs from Cisco at the top to hundreds of pre-Series-A startups in between, the tax picture in San Jose is more varied than any other single city in the Bay Area. We serve the full range: tech employees with RSUs and ESPPs, real estate investors who own multiple rentals through LLCs, immigrant family business owners with both US and international filings, and South Bay founders who went from 1099 income to C-corp equity in a single year.

Cooper Hathaway and Alfonso Nuñez, the firm's Managing Partners, built Silicon Valley Tax to handle exactly this complexity. We are a tax and accounting firm with CPAs on staff. Every return that goes out the door is reviewed by a credentialed professional who understands both the federal code and California's specific departure points. That matters here more than most places, because California's income tax treatment of RSUs, ESPP shares, 1031 exchanges, and pass-through income diverges from the federal treatment in ways that generate real dollars of difference on returns in the $300,000 to $2 million income range.

The San Jose Tech Employer Landscape

San Jose is not a satellite office city. It is where the headquarters are. Cisco Systems runs its global operations from its campus at Tasman Drive in North San Jose, a short drive from our Junction Ave office. Adobe's San Jose headquarters tower, visible from the Caltrain platform, employs thousands of engineers, designers, and finance professionals whose equity compensation packages are among the most complex we see. eBay's Whitman Campus in North San Jose remains the home of a large and long-tenured workforce even after the PayPal split and the subsequent spinoffs. PayPal's own headquarters sits nearby, with a substantial employee population that still holds legacy eBay stock from the early grant cycles.

Beyond the marquee names, San Jose hosts Western Digital's storage technology operations, the remnants of Brocade's networking hardware business now absorbed into Broadcom, Samsung Semiconductor's US design center, Sanmina's manufacturing headquarters, and Roku's engineering offices. Each of these companies runs a different equity compensation structure. Cisco tends toward long vesting periods with large RSU grants that accumulate significant unrealized gain for tenured employees. Adobe runs a standard RSU program alongside an ESPP with a 15% discount and a lookback provision. eBay and PayPal employees often hold concentrated positions in stock with a complicated history of spinoffs and basis adjustments that brokerages frequently report incorrectly.

Getting the tax treatment right for any of these positions requires knowing the plan documents, not just the W-2. We work with clients at all of these employers regularly, which means we are not learning the plan structure for the first time when we sit down with you.

RSU and ESPP Tax for San Jose Tech Employees

The most consistent tax problem we see across San Jose tech employees is the RSU withholding gap. When RSUs vest, your employer withholds federal income tax at the 22% supplemental wage rate, up to $1 million of supplemental income in a calendar year. Above $1 million, the rate jumps to 37%. The problem is that most engineers, senior managers, and directors in San Jose have a marginal federal rate of 32% or 35% on their combined income. That 10 to 13 percentage point gap between what is withheld and what is actually owed is not recovered anywhere in the payroll system. It accumulates through the year, and the bill comes due on April 15.

For a Cisco or Adobe employee with $400,000 in RSU vesting in a given year, the federal underpayment can exceed $40,000. California adds another layer: the state withholds supplemental wages at 10.23%, but marginal California rates for income in this range run from 10.3% to 13.3%. The state gap is smaller in absolute dollars but still material. We set clients up with quarterly estimated payments to absorb these gaps, timed to avoid the IRC 6654 underpayment penalty.

Adobe's ESPP introduces a separate planning question. Under Adobe's plan, employees contribute up to 15% of salary during a six-month offering period, with a lookback that sets the purchase price at 85% of the lower of the price at the start or end of the period. Shares sold after holding them at least two years from the offering date and one year from the purchase date receive qualifying disposition treatment: the discount element is ordinary income, and the remaining gain is long-term capital gain. Shares sold before meeting both thresholds are a disqualifying disposition, making the entire spread ordinary income. For employees with large ESPP positions, the decision of when to sell is a tax decision, not just an investment decision. We model both paths before any sale.

For eBay and PayPal employees, the basis-tracking challenge is significant. eBay spun off PayPal in 2015 with a tax-free split that required an allocation of basis between the two companies. Employees who received grants in the pre-2015 era and have held shares continuously may have brokerage 1099-Bs that report $0 basis, because the custodian never received the original grant information. Correcting these misreported basis figures is one of the most common adjustments we make for long-tenured eBay and PayPal employees, and skipping it means paying capital gains tax on money you already paid ordinary income tax on at vest.

For employees at Cisco who have been with the company for a decade or more, the vesting calendar can span multiple tax years across multiple grant cycles simultaneously. Multi-state sourcing becomes relevant for anyone who worked remotely in another state during any part of a grant's vesting period. California computes the sourced portion by ratio of California workdays to total workdays across the entire vesting period. That calculation requires records most employees do not keep track of on their own. See our equity compensation tax page for the complete framework.

Small Business and 1099 Income in South Bay

San Jose's small business community is substantial and diverse. The Vietnamese business corridor along Story Road and Tully Road includes hundreds of restaurants, nail salons, auto repair shops, and professional services firms. The Chinese-American business community anchors a large portion of Milpitas and East San Jose with retail, import, and tech services businesses. The Indian-American professional and entrepreneurial community runs a large number of consulting firms, IT staffing agencies, and healthcare practices. The Mexican-American business community operates extensively in the food service, construction, and landscaping sectors across Eastside San Jose, Berryessa, and Cambrian Park.

Many of these businesses operated for years as sole proprietorships or partnerships and are now at a scale where the entity structure decision has real tax consequences. A sole proprietor paying self-employment tax on $250,000 of net income owes roughly $20,900 in SE tax. An S-corp paying a reasonable salary of $120,000 on the same net income owes SE tax only on the salary portion, saving in the range of $12,000 per year. The savings do not come free: S-corps require payroll tax filings, a separate corporate return, and stricter bookkeeping. We model the net benefit after compliance costs before making a recommendation.

For South Bay founders who have moved from 1099 income to startup equity in the same year, the picture is more complex. Founder stock elections under IRC 83(b), QSBS exclusion eligibility under IRC 1202, and the interplay between startup equity and self-employment income from consulting work during the transition period all require careful sequencing. We work with early-stage founders at the entity-formation stage to make sure the right decisions get made before the stock has any value, when reversing a mistake is still possible.

See our San Jose small business CPA and bookkeeping services pages for additional detail on entity tax and bookkeeping support.

Real Estate Investors in the Bay Area

San Jose's median home price has held above $1.4 million through the rate cycle, which means that investors who bought properties in the 2010s are sitting on substantial unrealized gains, large accumulated depreciation deductions, and complex decisions about what to do with the properties as they approach retirement or estate planning. We serve a growing population of South Bay real estate investors, from those with a single rental property to those running portfolios of six to twelve units across multiple LLCs.

The most common planning issues we address for real estate investors: depreciation recapture under IRC 1250 on any sale, passive activity loss rules under IRC 469 for investors who do not qualify as real estate professionals, the net investment income tax under IRC 1411 on passive rental income above the $200,000 (single) and $250,000 (joint) AGI thresholds, and 1031 exchange mechanics for those looking to defer gain on a sale. California does not recognize 1031 exchanges for properties exchanged into California real estate when the replacement property is later sold outside the state, which creates a clawback exposure that many out-of-state advisors do not flag at the time of the exchange.

For investors operating through multiple LLCs, we prepare the entity returns at the LLC level and coordinate the pass-through reporting on the individual return. California's LLC gross receipts tax applies to each entity separately, so the structure itself carries an ongoing administrative cost we factor into planning recommendations. The decision to hold each property in its own LLC versus a holding structure is partly a liability decision and partly a tax and administrative cost decision. We give you the full picture.

Multi-Generational Immigrant Families and International Tax

San Jose and the South Bay are home to one of the most internationally connected populations in the United States. First and second-generation immigrants from India, China, Vietnam, Mexico, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and dozens of other countries make up a large share of the city's professional and business-owner population. For many of these households, the tax picture extends well beyond the domestic return.

Foreign financial accounts are the most common trigger. Any US person, including a green card holder or an H1B visa holder who has met the substantial presence test, must file an FBAR (FinCEN Form 114) if the aggregate balance of all foreign accounts exceeded $10,000 at any point in the calendar year. This is a separate filing from the tax return, filed with Treasury, with non-willful penalties of up to $10,000 per violation per year. The threshold is low enough that a modest savings account abroad plus an investment account easily triggers it, often for people who did not know the requirement applied to them.

For households where a parent or sibling still operates a business abroad, Form 5471 may be required if you are a 10% or greater shareholder or an officer or director of a foreign corporation. The penalties for missing this form are $10,000 per year per form, and the statute of limitations on your entire tax return stays open until the form is filed. Most filers who trigger this requirement did not know they were a shareholder. A parent lists a US-resident child on the foreign corporation's registration for succession planning reasons, and the US tax obligation attaches without any formal transaction.

We file international information returns every season: FBAR, Form 8938 under FATCA, Form 5471 for foreign corporations, Form 8865 for foreign partnerships, and Form 8621 for PFIC holdings in offshore mutual funds and unit trusts. Our Mandarin-speaking staff handle a significant portion of our international client base. If your household has any of these exposures, a mid-year planning meeting is the right time to scope the filing requirements, not the week before April 15.

International Tax for High-Net-Worth Immigrant Families

For high-net-worth immigrant households, the international tax exposure is frequently more significant than the domestic tax on the W-2. The combination of a well-compensated tech career and an inherited family business abroad creates a return that can require Form 5471, Form 8938, FBAR, Form 8621, and sometimes Form 3520 for foreign trust distributions, all in a single year. Missing one of these forms does not just create a penalty risk for that form. It leaves the statute of limitations open on the entire return indefinitely.

We handle the full international stack. For clients with PFIC holdings, particularly common among Indian and Chinese immigrants who held index funds or unit trusts in their home countries before moving to the US, we file Form 8621 and evaluate whether a mark-to-market or QEF election is still available to avoid the punitive default IRC 1291 regime. Default PFIC treatment taxes gains and distributions at the highest ordinary rate that applied during the holding period, plus an interest charge for the deferral. The effective rate can exceed 50% federal on a position held for several years. The election options rescue this outcome when made early enough.

The foreign tax credit under Form 1116 is the mechanism for avoiding double taxation on foreign-source income. We compute the credit limitation for each income basket and coordinate with any foreign tax returns the client must file to maximize the credit available on the US return. For clients with substantial investment income from both domestic and foreign sources, the credit computation can meaningfully reduce the US tax bill in ways that a simple deduction election would not.

The Advantage of In-Person Service at the Junction Ave Office

There is no shortage of national tax software companies and remote CPA firms competing for San Jose clients. Most of them handle straightforward returns competently. Where they consistently fall short is the complex, multi-factor situation: the Cisco employee who has RSU income, a rental property, a foreign bank account, and a small consulting side practice. In that case, the person preparing the return needs to understand how all four pieces interact, not just fill in the corresponding schedules independently.

Our Junction Ave office provides something specific: the ability to sit down with one of our principals, spread out the documents, and work through the picture in a single meeting. We accept document drop-offs at the office without an appointment, which matters during crunch periods when clients need to get materials to us quickly. For clients who have worked with us for multiple years, we maintain a file of their equity grant history, cost basis schedules, and prior-year returns that makes each subsequent year substantially less work to prepare accurately.

The office is easily accessible from Highway 101, 880, and 87, with free parking in the building lot. We are open Monday through Friday with extended evening hours during tax season, and limited Saturday availability for clients who cannot make a weekday appointment. Clients in the Willow Glen, Almaden Valley, Evergreen, and Rose Garden neighborhoods are a 15 to 25 minute drive. Clients in Berryessa and North San Jose are 10 minutes or less.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is your San Jose office?

Our office is at 2051 Junction Ave, Suite 200, San Jose, CA 95131, in the North San Jose corridor near Highway 101 and 880. Free parking is available on site. We serve clients in person on weekdays, with extended hours during tax season. Get directions on Google Maps.

How do you handle California RSU sourcing when employees worked remote?

California taxes RSU income based on the proportion of the vesting period worked in-state. For employees who spent time working remotely in another state during the vesting period, we calculate California-sourced income by applying the ratio of California workdays to total workdays across each grant's vesting period. This affects both your California 540 and, if you relocated, the non-resident return for the other state. Brokerages rarely account for this adjustment on the supplemental materials they send with the W-2, so most Cisco, Adobe, eBay, and PayPal employees who worked remote during 2020 to 2023 have at least one year that should be reviewed.

Do you serve small Vietnamese, Chinese, or Indian-owned San Jose businesses?

Yes. We serve a broad range of small-business owners across San Jose's Vietnamese, Chinese, Indian, and Mexican-American business communities. Our services include business entity returns (LLC, S-corp, C-corp, partnership), bookkeeping, payroll, sales tax compliance, and year-round tax planning. We have Mandarin-speaking staff and experience with family-owned businesses that have both US and international financial ties.

How is the 2026 California tax landscape changing under OBBBA?

The One Big Beautiful Budget Act makes several changes relevant to San Jose high-earners: the SALT deduction cap increases to $40,000 (phased out above $500,000 AGI), the Child Tax Credit is expanded, and several bonus depreciation and pass-through provisions are extended or modified. California does not automatically conform to federal law changes, so planning requires tracking federal and state treatment independently. For most San Jose tech employees and business owners, the SALT cap increase is the most immediate planning opportunity. We discuss these changes proactively with clients during mid-year planning meetings.

Do you do in-person meetings or only virtual?

Both. Our Junction Ave office is open for in-person meetings, document drop-offs, and walk-in consultations during business hours. We also offer full virtual service through our secure client portal and video consultations for clients who prefer to work remotely. There is no difference in scope or quality between the two formats. Many of our long-term clients combine both, dropping off physical documents at the office and conducting the review meeting virtually.

Can you handle real estate investor returns with multiple LLCs?

Yes. We prepare real estate investor returns that include multiple single-member or multi-member LLCs, Schedule E rental income and expenses, depreciation schedules, passive activity loss tracking, 1031 exchange reporting, California LLC gross receipts tax filings, and the net investment income tax analysis. For investors with active portfolios, we also provide bookkeeping services to keep the entity books current year-round, which reduces both the time required to prepare the return and the risk of missed deductions.

I am a Cisco, Adobe, or PayPal employee with concentrated stock. Can you help?

Yes. Concentrated equity positions at a single employer are one of the most common planning situations we handle. For Cisco employees with long-tenured RSU grants, we map the tax lot detail, identify the highest-basis shares, and model gain recognition across multiple calendar years. For Adobe ESPP participants, we analyze whether the holding period thresholds for qualifying disposition treatment have been met or are worth waiting for. For PayPal employees holding legacy eBay stock, we correct the basis figures that are frequently misreported on the 1099-B and document the adjustment for the return. See our equity compensation tax page for the full framework.

Visit Our Junction Ave Office

Ready to work with a San Jose tax and accounting firm that has CPAs on staff and over 23 years of South Bay experience? Book a complimentary consultation and we will review your situation before quoting the engagement. Also serving Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, and Saratoga.