Corporate America’s ability to sometimes pay little or no taxes on the income it earns has captured headlines recently. Consider this story from MSN Money: GE’s Corporate Tax Bill: Zero. There’s also this one from The Daily Beast: 15 Top Corporate Tax Dodgers. ABC News weighed in with a slightly less incendiary take on the matter in its story, Big Corporate Profits, Small Tax Bill. more

The hours you spend preparing your firm’s taxes may drop, albeit slightly, courtesy of the latest guidance to come from the IRS.

Until now, cell phones used in business were considered listed property, which is a “specific class of depreciable property that is subject to a special set of tax rules if it is used for business no more than 50 percent of the time…. Listed-property rules limit the amount of deductions and depreciation that can be taken if the asset isn’t predominantly used in a business or trade,” according to Investopedia. In general, items found on the “listed property” list are those that easily lend themselves to personal use, such as cars and cell phones. more

While more and more business processes are moving online, the human element still matters when it comes to business banking. That’s the conclusion of a recent report by Greenwich Associates, a research firm focusing on financial services.

It’s also a reversal of the enthusiasm with which small- and mid-sized businesses embraced Internet banking during the years just prior to the recession. By late 2009, these businesses said that their banks’ Internet platforms were just as important as their personal interactions with their banks. more

Consumers are steadily moving to electronic payments, drawn by the convenience of being able to pay bills online, as well as a desire to cut down on the amount of paper they use. This shift also can benefit the companies that offer these services.

In 2010, about 50 million households paid a bill through a biller’s online service, up from about 15 million just eight years earlier, according to the 2010 Billing Household Survey by Fiserv, Inc. Another 35 million paid their bills through a financial institution’s bill payment application, or about three times the number that did so in 2002, also according to the Survey. more

Four times each year, the IRS publishes the Statistics of Income Bulletin. As you might guess, it contains a multitude of numbers detailing the numbers of returns and income reported. Among the highlights of the most recent Bulletin, from Summer 2011:

• Sole proprietorships: Nearly 22.7 million individual returns from 2009 reported income from non-farm sole proprietorships. While that was up slightly from 2008, the overall profits reported on the returns dropped by 7.4 percent, to about $245 billion. A nice sum, to be sure, although it works out to just under $11,000 per return. What’s more, this was the fourth year that profits, in constant dollars, had decreased since before 1988. When it came to total business receipts, the retail sector overtook construction for the top spot; retailers accounted for $179 billion in receipts. Construction was next, with receipts of $173 billion. For the construction industry, that represented a drop of more than 16 percent from 2008. The only two sectors in which receipts increased were health care and social assistance. more