We’ve had a lot of questions from clients about the impact of the Tax Cuts and Jobs act on normal, working Americans. IRS did a clumsy job with implementation, although in their defense the TCJA probably raised more questions than it answered. Also, one of the most surprising effects will be felt by taxpayers who live in high tax jurisdictions and who itemize their deductions.
Friend of the firm, Arlene Cogen, has the #1 new release in Finance on Amazon – Give to Live: Make a Charitable Gift You Never Imagined.
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All summer we have been talking about the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair. We analyzed the opinion when it came out; we looked at the initial state responses in August; and we looked at one of the early Federal proposals in September. It’s been an exciting ride!
One of the things we’ve come to realize is that the Wayfair decision signals a convergence of the disparate state nexus thresholds for different types of tax. Correctly or not, the Commerce Clause and Due Process nexus thresholds for sales tax and income tax regimes are converging around the idea that a taxpayer needs to have “minimum contacts” with a taxing jurisdiction and must “purposefully avail” themselves of the jurisdiction’s economic market. Thanks to Public law 86-272 (codified at 15 USC §§ 381-384), nuance still exists in the areas of sales of solicitation of sales of tangible personal property. Also, the requirements of internal and external consistency help limit the deleterious impact of having thousands of taxing jurisdictions each doing their own thing.
Because there are all of these limitations and restrictions on a state’s ability to tax activity within its borders (however that may be defined), states in the last few years have been relying more and more heavily on “fees.” The challenge, of course, is that there isn’t a good definition of how to distinguish a “fee” from a “tax.”
Darlene Pasieczny will moderate “Hybrid Advisers” panel, Tuesday October 9th. They will be exploring issues in regulation and customer dispute resolution when a culpable financial adviser “wears two hats” as both a FINRA‐licensed broker and SEC‐licensed registered investment adviser. When is the brokerage firm responsible for conduct by its dual‐registered associated person? How do FINRA and the SEC parse enforcement issues for these hybrid advisers? The panel will discuss trends in customer arbitration cases, recent case law decisions, compliance and enforcement.
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We’re not ashamed to admit we’re a bit nerdy when it comes to tax matters. We always love talking/reading/studying (… eating/sleeping/living) tax and tax-related things. But even we think it’s been more exciting than usual in the world of state tax this summer!
The Supreme Court handed down its opinion in South Dakota v. Wayfair on June 21, 2018. Immediately after that, there was a flurry of activity as each state tried to address implementation of the “new” regime that would allow them to tax out of state vendors of tangible personal property into their states. Our initial look at Washington’s and California’s responses is here. Since then, lawmakers in dozens of states have proposed or introduced versions of the South Dakota law that attempt to tax remote sellers.
We wrote our initial analysis of South Dakota v. Wayfair on June 21, 2018. Since the Supreme Court issued its Wayfair, we have heard from clients with sales into sales tax-imposing jurisdictions who are concerned about what this means for their businesses.
Many states already had tax systems that would require a seller with no physical presence in their state to collect sales tax, which was the core issue in Wayfair. Other states (for example, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Vermont) adopted systems that would only go into effect if Wayfair was decided in a way that eliminated the physical presence requirement that the earlier Quill Corp. case had endorsed. Not all states had taken proactive measures to implement sales tax economic nexus. Some states are adopting additional, parallel nexus tests in the wake of Wayfair.