Tax Break

A boat on Lake Untersee near the Swiss-German border. REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann
Welcome to the top tax and accounting headlines from Reuters and other sources.
* Swiss spy charge signals German tax deal trouble. Katie Reid – Reuters. A Swiss decision to pursue German tax inspectors for industrial espionage is a sign of growing tension that could make it hard for both sides to secure parliamentary ratification of a deal preventing Germans dodging tax on their Swiss deposits. While Berlin is trying to tax an estimated 150 billion Swiss francs ($166 billion) hidden by Germans in Swiss accounts, Berne wants to avoid revealing the identities of wealthy customers who are a mainstay of its offshore financial services industry. Link   * Global business groups warn India over tax plan impact. Henry Foy – Reuters. International trade groups representing more than 250,000 companies have warned Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that new taxation proposals by his government have led foreign businesses to reconsider their investments. India’s federal budget last month outlined proposals that would allow authorities to make retroactive tax claims on overseas deals and bring in new anti-tax-avoidance measures, moves that have been criticized for further denting investor sentiment towards India. Link  

* California Democrats duel over taxes, budget. Vauhini Vara – The Wall Street Journal. California Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed ballot measure this fall to raise taxes and restore funding to an array of state programs faces unlikely opposition from a prominent Los Angeles lawyer who supported Brown’s election only 17 months ago. Attorney Molly Munger has proposed a rival ballot issue that also would raise taxes but earmark most of the new revenues for schools. The clash between Munger and Brown highlights the tension within California’s Democrats over how to prioritize spending now that the state is beginning to recover from its fiscal crisis. Link  

* Japan in sales-tax battle. Toko Sekiguchi – The Wall Street Journal. While Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s parliamentary submission of a sales-tax rise bill on Friday brings the premier one step closer to his goal of fiscal reconstruction, opposition from many lawmakers across the political spectrum is likely to make passage of the measure far from smooth. Anti-tax lawmakers within his party may hinder the premier’s attempt to push the tax discussion forward. The fiscally hawkish prime minister reiterated that he has staked his political career on writing into law the two-step national consumption tax increase to 10 percent by 2015. Link

* How to get the IRS to notice you. Andrea Coombes – The Wall Street Journal. The risk of an audit skyrockets for some. Fully 12.5 percent of taxpayers whose income topped $1 million faced an audit. And self-employed people who filed a Schedule C with gross receipts of $100,000 or more faced an audit rate of about 4 percent — four times higher than average taxpayers. Here are seven red flags. Link  

* Tax fantasy – The New York Times editorial. Paul Ryan’s big budget problem is that politicians’ most cherished constituencies are big recipients of the most cherished tax breaks. With some 70 percent of an annual $1.1 trillion in tax breaks flowing to the top 20 percent of taxpayers, and 20 percent going to the middle rung, politicians are loath to champion the end of specific tax breaks. What’s needed is a realistic approach, starting with letting the high-end Bush era tax cuts expire at the end of this year and closing blatant loopholes, including the unconscionably low tax rate for private equity partners. Link  

Some important upcoming events in the tax and accounting world:

Sunday, April 1 – Tuesday, April 3 – Council of Institutional Investors annual meeting in Washington, D.C.. Speakers include Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, SEC Commissioner Troy Paredes, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and Chinese accounting critic Carson Block, among others.

Tuesday, April 3 -

The IRS will hold a hearing on the allocation of interest expense by companies with a significant investment in a partnership, or which use the fair market value method. Starts at 10 a.m. in the IRS Auditorium in Washington. The Urban Institute is sponsoring a Washington event, also being webcast, entitled “Are There Too Many Nonprofits?”

Thursday, April 5 –

A luncheon at the National Press Club in Washington will feature IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman speaking on the future of the U.S. tax system and the IRS. The University of San Diego School of Law will sponsor a one-hour tax lecture by lawyer Leslie B. Samuels, a former Treasury Department and OECD official, on “Tax Reform in Today’s Fiscal Environment: Principles to Guide the Debate.”

U.S. President Barack Obama walks past a pumpjack, New Mexico, March 21, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Reed

Welcome to the top tax and accounting headlines from Reuters and other sources.

* Obama campaign seeks Romney tax returns. Mark Maremont – The Wall Street Journal. President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign called on Republican front-runner Mitt Romney to release his tax returns dating back to the 1980s, to see if they contain information about an uncommon investment arrangement at his former private-equity firm that may have helped swell his individual retirement account. The request follows a page-one article in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that recounted how employees at the firm, Bain Capital, were allowed to invest their retirement money in companies the firm acquired, including investing through a special share class that could skyrocket in value in successful deals. Romney’s IRA was valued at between $20.7 million and $101.6 million as of August, according to his financial disclosures. Link

* GOP blocks Obama’s effort to end tax breaks for big oil. Zachary Goldfarb and Brad Plumer – The Washington Post. President Obama on Thursday called on Congress to end tax breaks for oil companies in a populist speech that sought to turn the blame for gas prices nearing $4 a gallon back onto his Republican critics. In fiery, campaign-style remarks delivered from the Rose Garden, Obama told lawmakers that they can “stand with big oil companies, or they can stand with the American people.” Senate Democrats followed by forcing a vote to end tax cuts for the five largest oil companies, which Republicans resoundingly defeated. Link

An ambitious reform agenda at the main U.S. auditor watchdog — already under fire from the accounting industry — has now drawn the ire of members of Congress.

At a hearing on Wednesday, members of a House Financial Services subcommittee took aim at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, saying some of the items on its agenda, including term limits for audit firms and making its disciplinary proceedings public, would amount to regulatory overreach.

Investor advocates had expected for some time that PCAOB chairman James Doty would be called before Congress to defend his activist agenda. The rotation idea, still in its early stages, would upset some of the accounting industry’s longest-standing client relationships, and the business lobby has pressed Congress to intervene.

* Germany to agree to tougher Swiss tax deal-paper. Emma Thomasson – Reuters. Germany is set to agree a revised deal with Switzerland on secret offshore accounts that involves higher rates of taxes than originally planned to meet objections from the opposition, a Swiss newspaper reported on Thursday. Citing unnamed sources, the Tages-Anzeiger daily said German state premiers meeting in Berlin on Thursday should sign off on the deal after the opposition Social Democrats (SPD) and Greens apparently accepted Swiss concessions to tighten the agreement. Link

* Panel clears Ernst & Young unit in Olympus scandal. Kana Inagaki – The Wall Street Journal. Closing another chapter in probes into the scandal that rocked Olympus Corp. last year, an independent panel of lawyers and professors on Thursday cleared Ernst & Young ShinNihon LLC of legal responsibility in its audit of the company’s accounts. But the panel also called on the accounting industry to take measures that go beyond existing legal obligations to better spot potential fraud. Ernst & Young ShinNihon commissioned the four-member panel in December after a separate panel appointed by Olympus’ board raised questions over the hand-over process when Ernst & Young took over the auditing of the company from KPMG AZSA LLC in 2009. KPMG AZSA audited Olympus’ accounts from 1974 to 2009. Link

* Cameron hits back over claims of elitism. George Parker – The Financial Times. British Prime Minister David Cameron has attempted to dispel Labour claims that he leads an elitist “out of touch” government, when he declared his love of Cornish pasties, one of the hot foods that will be taxed more under budget value-added tax rules. The comments came after George Osborne announced a Budget measure on takeaway food, putting a 20 per cent VAT charge on food “sold above ambient temperatures” – immediately named a “pasty tax”. Labour has revelled in the government’s discomfort. Link

Fiscal Commission co-chairs Alan Simpson (L) and Erskine Bowles April 14, 2011. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

Welcome to the top tax and accounting news from Reuters and other sources.

* The case for raising top tax rates. Eduardo Porter – The New York Times. The wealthy are feeling defensive about their taxes. Most Americans may think the rich pay too little but, not surprisingly, only 30 percent of the rich agree. More than two-thirds of families earning a quarter of a million dollars a year or more tell Gallup’s pollsters that their taxes are too high. It is true that high-income Americans carry the biggest tax burden. While fewer than 1 in 20 families make more than $200,000, they pay almost half of all federal taxes. However they feel about the tax man, there is a case to be made that they can pay much more. The reason has nothing to do with fairness, justice or ideology. It is about economics and math. Link

* US FASB weighs reform to accounting used by MF Global. Sarah Lynch – Reuters. The U.S. accounting standard-setting board could this year revamp the accounting treatment that MF Global used to mask risky European sovereign debt exposure, an official at the board will tell lawmakers on Wednesday. “Moving forward with this project will involve a series of public education and decision-making meetings and the exposure of a proposed standard for public comment,” said Financial Accounting Standards Board Technical Director Susan Cosper in prepared testimony. Cosper noted that while historically most repo-to-maturity transactions have involved U.S. Treasury securities, the range of instruments involved has broadened over the years to include other debt instruments such as those seen in the MF Global case. Link

Then-U.S. Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) gestures as he talks about the U.S. tax code in 2007 REUTERS/Frank Polich

How big is the tax code?

Wait…how many pages do they think War and Peace is? Kay Bell writes in her Don’t Mess With Taxes blog that the floor of Congress has logged several attempts to quantify the length of the U.S. tax code. “At 1.3 million pages it is twice the length of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace,” said one House Representative, speaking of the United States tax code. Another popular reference for the code’s impressive verbosity – The Bible.

The quotes in the linked blog have yet to be fact-checked, but one assured fact is that the tax code in its entirety is a long, murky mess. The impulse to reform is strong, but before that happens, Bell writes, “make Congress leave the tax code alone for a while.”

In this video Reuters personal business editor Lauren Young offers the skinny on deductions you may be eligible for — but be sure to keep receipts!

Welcome to the top tax and accounting headlines from Reuters and other sources.

* Bill ending oil company tax cuts clears Senate hurdle. Ayesha Rascoe and Richard Cowan – Reuters. Legislation repealing tax breaks for major oil companies passed its first hurdle in the Senate on Monday, but is unlikely to become law, as Republicans and Democrats seek to score political points over rising gasoline prices. The Senate voted 92 to 4 to proceed with consideration on the bill that would eliminate billions of dollars in tax breaks for the “big five” oil companies: Exxon Mobil Corp, BP Plc, ConocoPhillips, Chevron Corp and Royal Dutch Shell Plc. The lopsided vote in favor of moving ahead with consideration of the oil tax cuts bill reflected political maneuvering in the chamber, not actual support for the measure. Link

* Dow court cases pushes limit of R&D tax credit. Patrick Temple-West and Ernest Scheyder – Reuters. Dow Chemical Co is challenging the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in a rare court case over expanding the research and development tax credit to cover the costs of supplies used to improve the ways existing products are made. Oral arguments are set for Thursday at the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in a case that pits Union Carbide, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow, against the IRS. A win for Dow would widen the scope of the R&D credit – a mainstay of the corporate tax code that costs U.S. taxpayers roughly $7 billion a year – at a time when corporate tax breaks, in general, are under scrutiny in Washington. Link

* New CEO at accounting firm BDO USA aims for growth. Nanette Byrnes – Reuters. The 270 partners of accounting firm BDO USA selected Wayne Berson, 50, as their leader for the next four years, it was announced on Monday. BDO USA, with $572 million in U.S. fee income last year, is the seventh-largest accounting firm in the country, according to International Accounting Bulletin. Link

Dome of the U.S. Capitol REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Message to U.S.-based multinational companies: it is not too soon to lobby lawmakers on U.S. tax reform.

The messengers: former and current congressional tax staffers speaking at a meeting of tax executives in Washington, D.C., on Monday.

“Don’t wait until we’ve decided what we are going to do (to come see us),” Senate Finance Committee tax counsel Jeff VanderWolk, who works for Democrat Max Baucus, chairman of that panel, told hundreds of tax officials from Fortune 500 companies at a Tax Executive Institute gathering in Washington today.