|
|
State Fiscal Conditions
|
On April 25, Scott Pattison, Executive Director of the National Association of
State Budget Officers (NASBO), spoke to the Tax Economists Forum, a
Washington, DC based group of public finance economists, about the current
condition of state finances and the outlook for the future. To briefly
summarize Mr. Pattison’s presentation: the current fiscal condition of state
governments has improved somewhat when compared to fiscal years 2008,
but states, as a whole, face significant challenges in both the near-term and
the long-term. Some of the challenges facing state governments include: an
aging population requiring expensive health care and other social services;
some states will be forced to accommodate large numbers of immigrants;
and declines in federal spending, both in terms of decreased grants-in-aid
and indirect cuts such as reductions in defense spending. MEDICAID
spending is projected to increase by $19.4 billion between fiscal year 2011
and 2012, much of it driven by the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act.
Read more ...
|
|
MTC Files Brief in Gillette
|
| 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. |
|
Spangler Offers Perspectives On Four Decades With Idaho, MTC
|
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. |
|
MTC Review Spring 2011
|
 |
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.
|
|
Back to the BAT Cave
|
| 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. |
|
Looking for items no longer here? Archive Homepage
|