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2018April 12, 2018
You Say Fiddy, I Say Foedee—No One Knows What to Call New Tax Provisions
Headline writers at industry publication Tax Notes took notice, offering up “More GILTI Than You Thought,” “Get with the BEAT,” “A Response to an Off-BEAT Analysis” and “Can Marked-Up Services Skip the BEAT?” among others.
April 10, 2018
Swift rise for IRS bill
For instance, the budget scorekeeper believes that multinationals will cut back on offshore profit shifting by around $65 billion a year under the new law, even as CBO also found that the so-called GILTI provisions — meant to tamp down on offshore gaming — might actually push companies to place more assets abroad. (To be fair, experts like Marty Sullivan of Tax Analysts and Kyle Pomerleau of the Tax Foundation are skeptical on that last point.)
April 10, 2018
The Finance 202: Republicans are the drivers of skyrocketing deficit
Critics of the measure who have argued it would accelerate offshoring of U.S. jobs and investment claimed vindication in that bit of analysis. Others argued the CBO has it wrong, including Tax Analysts chief economist Martin Sullivan, who tweeted that the agency is “simply incorrect:”
April 3, 2018
Give us all the guidance
The interest deduction guidance largely deals with “some of the important but low-hanging fruit,” as one practitioner told Tax Notes, and makes it clear that fuller rules are forthcoming.
March 22, 2018
The Spending Deal: $1.3 Trillion, 2,232 Pages, One Messy Process
Other experts also decried the process. “Disclosure of long bills a short time before a vote is fake transparency,” Martin Sullivan, chief economist at Tax Analysts, tweeted.
March 20, 2018
GOP expects Democrats’ help in fixing the tax plan’s errors
Asked to describe the scope of the mistakes in the Republican tax law, Marty Sullivan, chief economist at the non-partisan Tax Analysts, told Politico, “This is not normal. There’s always this kind of stuff, but the order of magnitude is entirely different.”
March 15, 2018
'Beware the Ides of March' on March 15: Story behind the cursed date
From 1918 to 1954, Tax Day fell on March 15. Congress moved the date up a month -- to April 15 -- in 1955 to "give IRS employees a break," according to the Tax History Project, a website set up more than 20 years ago by tax analysts that provides information on the history of American finance. It has remained that date ever since.
March 9, 2018
Who's Up Next?
Lawmakers took a crack at putting a new tax on employees making the most at tax-exempt organizations, with college sports coaches seemingly the top target — like Saban, the University of Alabama’s very successful football coach. But it’s not clear whether the provision as written — which exempted certain medical professionals, but not public university employees — needs a technical correction, Stephanie Cumings reports.
March 8, 2018
President Trump Offered a History Lesson on Tariffs. Here’s What He Left Out
Even before that decade, the tariff was on its way out. The early 20th century saw two major nails in the coffin of U.S. tariffs, says Joseph J. Thorndike, director of the Tax History Project. Each corresponds with a different function of a tariff: protecting domestic industry (or punishing foreign industry) and raising revenue.
February 27, 2018
Could States Fix The SALT Deduction Cap By Taxing Pass-Throughs And Giving Their Owners A Credit?
A nice article in Tax Notes (paywall) describes the plan in detail. And State Revenue Commissioner Kevin Sullivan summarized it to the journal this way: “I call it the virtuous tax circle — no losers, all gainers, and a bit of payback for what I think was the utter disregard of the Congress for the impact of this on states like Connecticut.”
February 24, 2018
'This is not normal': Glitches mar new tax law
“This is not normal,” said Marty Sullivan, chief economist at the nonpartisan Tax Analysts. “There’s always this kind of stuff, but the order of magnitude is entirely different.”
February 22, 2018
What's happening, OMB
“Section 199A is seven pages of rat’s nest of jumbled rationales,” Calvin Johnson, a University of Texas law professor, said in a Tax Notes piece that posits the pass-through provision “has already unleashed plenty of havoc for both taxpayers and the government, and it seems a likely source of mischief through at least 2025.”
February 21, 2018
Coalition time
One area to watch out for with the group, called Parity for Main Street Employers: Efforts at the state level to tax pass-throughs at the entity level, and give a corresponding tax credit to the company’s owners to avoid double taxation. Connecticut has released a similar proposal in its efforts to skirt the GOP tax law’s new cap on state and local deductions, as Tax Notes reported this month.
February 19, 2018
10 Facts About Presidents And Tax - And Why It's Not Really Presidents' Day
Since the 1970s, most presidents (and recent candidates for president) have chosen to make their tax returns public. You can click through a number of them at the Tax History Project managed by Tax Analysts.
February 5, 2018
Give me those rules
That would be in what Tax Notes calls a “stark contrast” to the 1986 tax overhaul, in which the Reagan administration largely did rely on notices.
February 1, 2018
IRS expands list of large business audit ‘campaigns’
For example, an LB&I official recently said that one of its original campaigns, which focused on land developers and the completed-contract method of accounting, resulted in numerous filings of Form 3115, Application for Change in Accounting Method (Athanasiou, "LB&I Campaign Lessons and Selection Process Explained," 157 Tax Notes 1053 (Nov. 20, 2017)).
January 29, 2018
Growing Deficits, a Lawsuit, and More TCJA Questions
Tax Notes economics columnist Marty Sullivan crunches the numbers and concludes that—on average--foreign investment still will be tax advantaged under the TCJA, through it will benefit somewhat less than under the pre-TCJA law.
January 25, 2018
Looking into the commish
Tax Notes reports the agency will be digging in on some of the most complex changes, including the new provisions for pass-through businesses and the limits on the deduction for business interest.
January 25, 2018
Looking into the commish
One particularly knotty question, according to Emily Foster of Tax Notes — the 20 percent tax deduction for pass-throughs is available to all but a “specified service trade or business,” which is a pretty broad definition.
January 22, 2018
10 Questions to Ask a Tax Professional About the New Tax Law
“All through the year there will be updates coming out of the IRS and Treasury telling tax pros how to work with clients to implement this law,” says Chuck O’Toole, editor of Tax Notes