Tax Strategies

The Senate narrowly passed a budget for the first time in four years on a mostly party line vote, calling for $975 billion in additional tax revenue over the next 10 years along with state sales tax collections on online sales.

The House Ways and Means Select Revenue Measures Subcommittee held a hearing this week to discuss possible tax reforms on financial products such as derivatives.

The two leaders of the Senate Finance Committee, chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and ranking Republican member Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, have begun developing proposals for reforming the U.S. Tax Code, including giving the Internal Revenue Service the clear statutory authority to regulate tax preparers in case the IRS loses its appeal of a recent court case invalidating its Registered Tax Return Preparer regime.

As U.S. lawmakers drafted a bill extending wind-energy tax credits in August, they revised a key clause that opens the door for a much bigger boost to the industry than just the one-year addition that was eventually passed.

The United States is now facing two deficits—a government budget deficit and a balance of trade deficit. These two deficits, together, will ultimately put the future of the United States in peril unless the government and its citizens take strong action.

House Republicans have passed the budget plan introduced by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., for fiscal year 2014, which shrinks the number of tax brackets to two brackets of 10 and 25 percent.

In the world of trust and estate administration, where tax planning typically involves special attention to federal tax law compliance, it’s easy to lose focus on state income taxation issues. And while some states do not tax income related to trusts, states that do tax trust income have a variety of rules and criteria for which trusts are subject to tax.

The U.S. economy will be between 1.5 and 2.6 percent smaller over the long-term because other nations’ corporate tax rates are considerably more competitive, according to a new study by Ernst & Young and the RATE Coalition, a group lobbying for lower corporate tax rates.

Headquartered in a former Rothschild chateau in an affluent Parisian neighborhood, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is best known for earnest conferences on economic and social policy.

Europe’s drive to rescue Cyprus risks undermining a region-wide deposit guarantee plan, a key tenet in the battle to contain the debt crisis, and casts doubt on the ability of the weakest lenders to retain deposits.