If you’re a business taxpayer with assets over $10 million and you file under FIN 48, the IRS has a new tax return schedule in the works for you.

IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman announced yesterday that the agency wants public and private companies that meet those criteria to provide “concise descriptions” of their uncertain tax positions and to disclose the maximum amount of income tax they’d be liable for if the positions were not sustained.

What, so FIN 48 itself wasn’t enough? more

As I noted in this blog a few weeks ago, the IRS is gearing up for the first stage of a massive audit sweep targeting employers’ payroll tax practices. Tax law firms are starting to turn out some useful alerts and advisories.

David R. Fuller and Jerry E. Holmes, of Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, are not mincing words about the scope of the IRS initiative: “Likening this project to a tsunami is an apt description,” they say. more

Announcing a new directive today aimed at ensuring that companies with serious tax delinquencies don’t win new federal contracts, President Obama had harsh words for “deadbeat” company owners, singling out one guy who “owed over $1 million in taxes and was paid over $1 million as a defense contractor — and instead of using that money to pay his back taxes, he chose to buy a boat, some cars, and a home abroad with his earnings. more

Announcing a $3.2 billion tax credit for manufacturers of clean energy technologies last week, President Obama noted that “building a robust clean energy sector is how we will create the jobs of the future — jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.”

It’s a comforting thought — at least a job in a solar cell production facility can’t disappear over the phone lines to a provider in Bangalore. But clean-tech manufacturing companies can still walk, taking their green jobs with them. And, chances are, many of them will do precisely that if — as must surely happen at some point — the tax and regulatory climate turns less favorable to their industry. more

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial got me thinking again about the link, or lack thereof, between taxes and happiness (or lack thereof).

The Journal picked up on a rather abstruse piece of research which showed that the subjective measures of happiness so beloved by behavioral scientists (as featured in questions like “How happy do you feel on a scale of 1 to 4?”) are not just vague hogwash, but do actually correlate with objective measures of quality of life, such as environmental conditions, quality of schools, and crime rates.

But what caught the eye of Journal editor Allysia Finley wasn’t the study’s Earth-shattering conclusion that when people say they’re happy, it’s probably because they are actually happy. It was a ranking of states by happiness. Finley stood that list side-by-side with a 2008 Tax Foundation ranking by tax burden, and guess what? “Three of the top five unhappiest states — New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey — have the highest state-local tax burdens. On the other hand, four of the top five happiest states — Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, and Arizona — are among the states with the lowest state-local tax burdens.” more