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John Cummings CORPORATE TAX: Blogger John Cummings supplies the Business Finance community with reporting and...more
The Senate Finance Committee’s version of the great American health-care makeover, unveiled today by Sen. Max Baucus, runs to some 200-plus pages, and if adopted in its present form — a very big if — will cost an estimated $856 billion over the next 10 years.
How would the package affect corporate taxes? more
The ink was hardly dry on the April 2008 merger of business information giants Reuters Group and The Thomson Corp. when the new combined entity embarked on an aggressive campaign to beef up its Tax & Accounting business, including the acquisition of GRC heavyweight Paisley in January of this year. The spending spree continued this week with Thomson Reuters’s announcement that it plans to snap up Abacus Enterprise, a suite of tax software products, from Deloitte LLP. more
Charged by President Obama with identifying ways to overhaul the entire U.S. tax code by “closing loopholes, streamlining the law, and generating revenue,” the Volcker Task Force on Tax Reform faces a monumental task. Nonprofit publisher Tax Analysts weighed in last week with a cartload of advice for Mr. Volcker in the form of short papers by academic and legal tax experts.
The writers were asked to imagine that they were meeting with the task force members and had just five minutes — or about one thousand words — to present their recommendations for fixing the system. The result is a collection of admirably succinct papers containing some fascinating, and quite radical, proposals. more
It’s not often you hear about a business turning its back on a potential tax credit, so I was intrigued to read this week that the Philadelphia Eagles have done just that in signing star quarterback Michael Vick, fresh from his 18-month stint in federal prison for organizing dogfight tournaments. The city’s Mayor’s Office for the Re-entry of Ex-Offenders (MORE) offers a $10,000 credit for companies that hire ex-cons, according to this story in the Philadelphia Daily News. Chump change to the Eagles, of course; a spokeswoman for the franchise said the tax break was never considered, nor was the team trying to make any kind of statement about ex-offenders or re-entry in signing Vick.
Maybe so, but Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie has been laying on the rhetoric about compassion, contrition, and second chances a bit too thick, argues Bloomberg columnist Scott Soshnick in this commentary. Soshnick’s not buying it; the Vick deal “was about football, not forgiveness,” he writes. more
Sarbanes-Oxley touched off a scramble to tighten the connections between tax and finance along the reporting axis, and since then other area of integration have been receiving increased attention, notably systems architecture and process design. But finance-tax integration is still a long way behind where it needs to be, especially at the level of enterprise technology and data exchange. In fact, the growing complexity of both the finance and tax functions in increasingly globalized organizations is actually driving them further apart, according to a new white paper from PricewaterhouseCoopers. more
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