Tax planning

The Treasury Department announced plans to extend and expand the New Markets Tax Credit with a proposal in the fiscal year 2011 budget to provide $5 billion in credits to speed recovery in hard-hit communities.

U.S. taxation of international operations was named as the top business tax concern in 2010, according to a poll of senior tax executives at multinational companies and trade associations.

Former New York Mayor Edward Koch used to gauge his job performance with the catch phrase, "How'm I doing?" Throughout his reign in the 1980s, the colorful Koch would repeat the question to the citizenry of the Big Apple, until it almost became synonymous with his tenure.

As part of the IRS's continuing efforts to require greater disclosure of tax positions and strategies on returns, it recently released new, mandatory disclosure rules for grouping passive activities. Rev. Proc. 2010-13 for the first time mandates that passive-activity groupings and regrouping, as required under Code Sec. 469 regulations, be disclosed on the taxpayer's return.

Tax-advantaged strategies to fund children's college education continue to offer CPA clients some relief from that heavy financial burden, but their value will vary widely according to each taxpayer's financial picture.

The fourth year of Ernst & Young's Discover Tax Leadership Conference drew 102 minority college students from all over the country to New York (braving the cold) to learn about tax - and themselves.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has introduced a bill that would tax more Wall Street bonuses than similar legislation introduced a week ago.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has unveiled a stripped-down version of the draft jobs legislation that was proposed only hours earlier by the bipartisan leaders of the Senate Finance Committee.

Senate Finance Committee leaders publicly released a draft Thursday of the widely anticipated jobs bill they plan to introduce, including payroll tax provisions and the extension of a number of tax breaks that expired last year.

The Senate has unanimously approved a bill that would prevent small businesses from incurring large tax penalties aimed at large corporations and wealthy individuals who invest in tax shelters.

Senate Democrats have begun circulating a draft version of the jobs bill they plan to introduce, with a series of tax breaks and tax extenders designed to lure Republican support.

A coalition of charities, aid groups, unions, and movie actors and directors has launched a campaign calling for a global 0.05 percent tax on banks’ speculative financial transactions, with the proceeds going to combat poverty and climate change.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Jim Webb, D-Va., have introduced legislation that would impose a tax on large bonuses paid by Wall Street banks and other firms that received more than $5 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2009.

Despite its massive tax increases, the President’s 2011 Budget Plan contains a number of revenue provisions calculated to encourage business expansion and move the economy upward.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Chilean Finance Minister Andrés Velasco signed a new income tax treaty between the United States and Chile to provide certainty and stability of tax treatment for U.S. and Chilean cross-border investors.

The United States and Hungary have signed a new income tax treaty that brings an existing agreement signed by the two countries in 1979 into closer conformity with current U.S. international tax policy.

IMGCAP(1)]Google has contrived a convoluted way to determine its income tax responsibilities to the U.S. and other taxing jurisdictions, in part by shifting income to its operations in Ireland.

A new report from BNA Tax & Accounting on transfer pricing predicts that tax authorities in different countries will continue to closely scrutinize intercompany transactions across national borders and will begin simultaneous audits of several large companies’ intercompany prices this year.

A free guide for CPAs to sales and use tax has been released by sales tax technology provider SpeedTax.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden previewed some of the major themes in the president’s upcoming State of the Union address, including a proposal to increase some tax credits for middle-class families.