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John Cummings CORPORATE TAX: Blogger John Cummings supplies the Business Finance community with reporting and...more
OK, a line has been crossed here.
I reported Tuesday (here) on the tax activist group US Uncut, which is currently targeting Bank of America in its campaign to end what it describes as “corporate tax dodging.” The group’s counterpart in the United Kingdom, UK Uncut, has been waging a similar, year-long campaign against Vodafone, and today is boasting that it hacked into the cell phone giant’s website. more
“Hey, hey, B of A, how many taxes offshored today?”
“I pay, you pay, why doesn’t B of A?”
Just a couple of the chants you might hear this Saturday if you happen to be strolling by your local Bank of America branch.
US Uncut, a grass-roots political action group opposed to what it describes as “unnecessary and unfair cuts to public services across the U.S.,” is planning a national day of demonstrations against the bank, which it claims has “consistently avoided any form of accountability to the American taxpayer” and “imperiled an entire nation with its greed” (quotes from the group’s website). more
The IRS has announced a raft of measures designed to reduce its use of liens and other drastic collection tools. The goal is “to help individuals and small businesses meet their tax obligations without adding unnecessary burden to taxpayers,” according to the Service’s announcement. more
U.S. companies may be thankful that, even though they have to thread their way through the maze of state and local sales taxes, they don’t have to deal with a national value added tax (VAT) of the type that’s so common among the OECD nations and many other countries around the world. (Which is not to say they won’t have to at some point in the future: Authoritative voices in this country are calling for a VAT. PwC’s Peter Merrill is one such, see my blog here.)
As soon as a company presses beyond U.S. boundaries, though, it’s bound to bump into the global king of the indirect taxes. And it’s not just retailers that face this challenge; the whole point of a VAT, of course, is to involve all of the links in the value chain in processing the tax, so the compliance joy gets spread around. more
I’ve been much encouraged recently to see reports that the States are finally starting to claw their way out of the deficit holes caused by the Great Recession. The Rockefeller Institute’s preliminary research for Q4 of 2010, for example, shows that collections were up nearly 7 percent over the same period in the prior year, a result that “indicates new strength in state tax revenues.”
But there’s no sign that State tax authorities are ready to ease the pressure on sales tax rates. Quite the opposite, according to a report released today by tax software firm Vertex Inc. (available here as a pdf). more
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