MTC Wants Your Input – Draft Mission, Vision, Values and Goals
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The MTC Strategic Planning Steering Committee is asking the states and our external stakeholders to comment on our working draft mission, values, vision and strategic goal areas – click here to access this document. Please encourage anyone in your organization who works with the MTC to take the time to review that document and provide their comments and suggestions.
The Steering Committee will review your comments and ideas during its next meeting on Thursday, February 23rd, so we ask that comments be provided by February 20th. Please submit any comments to Elizabeth Harchenko.
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MTC Files Brief in Gillette
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| The Multistate Tax Commission has filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the California Franchise Tax Board in The Gillette Company & Subsidiaries v. California Franchise Tax Board,
currently pending in the California Court of Appeal, First Appellate
District. In Gillette, the taxpayers claim the right to elect to
apportion their income on the basis of the equally-weighted three factor
formula contained in Article IV of the Multistate Tax Compact,
notwithstanding California’s mandatory four-factor apportionment
formula with a double weighted sales factor. The Commission’s brief
asserts that the Compact allows individual member states great
flexibility in working together to achieve the purposes of the Compact
and that the member states retain sovereign authority to administer all
aspects of their tax systems including the choice of apportionment
formulae. Furthermore, under principles of interstate compact law it is
for the parties to the compact to determine the compact’s meaning and
that the compact states, by their course of performance, have indicated
that California’s statute is fully consistent with the flexibility
inherent in the Compact and the promotion of the Compact’s purposes. |
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Spangler Offers Perspectives On Four Decades With Idaho, MTC
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In his SALT Shakers column on October 10, 2011, State Tax Notes editor
Doug Sheppard interviews Ted Spangler, recipient of the Commission's
2011 Paull Mines Award and storied state tax attorney from Idaho. Ted is
one of the longest serving officials in the Commission's history, most
of the time as the chair of the Commission's Uniformity Committee. His
reflections on the Commission and state and local tax practice in
general is well worth a read.
Tax Analysts has graciously provided us permission to post this interview on our site; you can access the article by clicking here. |
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Commission Adopts Three Uniformity Recommendations
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At its 44th annual business meeting on July 27th in Whitefish, Montana, the Commission considered three uniformity proposals. The three proposals before the Commission were all adopted as uniformity recommendations to the states: (1) a model statute for Disallowance of Deductions for Certain Payments to Captive Real Estate Investment Trusts, (2) a model Mobile Workforce Statute, and (3) an amendment to the Commission's model Combined Reporting Statute Section 1.I. – Definition of “Tax Haven” for Purposes of Water’s Edge Election. (Note: Each of these can be accessed from the Commission's agenda found using the 2011 Annual Conference and Committee Meetings link.)
These uniformity recommendations will be submitted to the states for their consideration. All recommendations of the Commission are advisory to the states. For a recommendation to become effective in any state, that state must affirmatively adopt the proposal through its own legislative or regulatory process. |
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MTC Review Spring 2011
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The latest issue of the MTC Review has been released. In addition to the text of a letter sent by Executive Director Joe Huddleston to the U.S. Treasury Secretary on “Corporate Tax Reform in a Time of Fiscal Crisis,” the issue contains three articles. The first article is “Back to the BAT Cave” by Elliot Dubin, our director of policy research. The second article is “State and Local Finances: Where We’re Going” by Tracy Gordon, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Okun-Model Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. Finally, the third article is “State and Local Finances: Part Two,” also by Elliott Dubin. Click here to access these articles, as well as previous issues of the Review.
The Commission welcomes your comments on these articles, suggestions for topics, and submissions for future issues of the Review.
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Back to the BAT Cave
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| It seems like every year for the past ten years a new version of the Business Activity Tax Simplification Act is introduced in Congress. This year is no exception. On April 13, 2011, the Subcommittee on Courts, Commercial & Administrative Law of the House Judiciary Committee held its first hearing on H.R. 1439, The Business Activity Tax Simplification Act of 2011. The purpose of this proposed legislation is to make clear that state tax jurisdiction over out-of-state businesses is limited to those entities that maintain certain forms of physical presence within the state's boundaries. While minimizing uncertainty and creating a stable business environment are laudable, there is no evidence that extending Public Law 86-272 — a 52 year old law that was designed as a stop-gap measure — to the interstate sale of services and intangible products will actually achieve those goals. Furthermore, there is no evidence that if H.R. 1439 were to become law, business investment would actually increase given the relatively small impact of business activity taxes on the private business sector. This article,appears in the latest edition of the Multistate Tax Commission Review, provides information on the size of state and local government business activity taxes relative to state budgets and to the overall size of the business sector. |
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State Tax Amnesties
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| For a list of state tax amnesties please click here. |
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