Tax planning

Senate Finance Committee leaders publicly released a draft Thursday of the widely anticipated jobs bill they plan to introduce, including payroll tax provisions and the extension of a number of tax breaks that expired last year.

The Senate has unanimously approved a bill that would prevent small businesses from incurring large tax penalties aimed at large corporations and wealthy individuals who invest in tax shelters.

Senate Democrats have begun circulating a draft version of the jobs bill they plan to introduce, with a series of tax breaks and tax extenders designed to lure Republican support.

A coalition of charities, aid groups, unions, and movie actors and directors has launched a campaign calling for a global 0.05 percent tax on banks’ speculative financial transactions, with the proceeds going to combat poverty and climate change.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Jim Webb, D-Va., have introduced legislation that would impose a tax on large bonuses paid by Wall Street banks and other firms that received more than $5 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2009.

Despite its massive tax increases, the President’s 2011 Budget Plan contains a number of revenue provisions calculated to encourage business expansion and move the economy upward.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and Chilean Finance Minister Andrés Velasco signed a new income tax treaty between the United States and Chile to provide certainty and stability of tax treatment for U.S. and Chilean cross-border investors.

The United States and Hungary have signed a new income tax treaty that brings an existing agreement signed by the two countries in 1979 into closer conformity with current U.S. international tax policy.

IMGCAP(1)]Google has contrived a convoluted way to determine its income tax responsibilities to the U.S. and other taxing jurisdictions, in part by shifting income to its operations in Ireland.

A new report from BNA Tax & Accounting on transfer pricing predicts that tax authorities in different countries will continue to closely scrutinize intercompany transactions across national borders and will begin simultaneous audits of several large companies’ intercompany prices this year.

A free guide for CPAs to sales and use tax has been released by sales tax technology provider SpeedTax.

President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden previewed some of the major themes in the president’s upcoming State of the Union address, including a proposal to increase some tax credits for middle-class families.

Switzerland’s Federal Administrative Court has ruled that the agreement for UBS to disclose the identities of 4,450 U.S.-based taxpayers to the IRS violates the country’s banking secrecy laws.

BMG CPAs LLP has created iDonatedIt, an iPhone and iPod Touch application that calculates, tracks, and reports non-cash charitable donations.

Liberty Tax Service has taken a cue from the Subway sandwich shop chain and hired a “Jared-like” customer as the official spokesman for its eSmartTax.com online tax prep service.

The effects of the economic downturn have been particularly hard on states, which will make life interesting in the year ahead for firms that sell services in the state and local tax area.

Grant Thornton anticipates state budgets will remain under pressure this year even if the economy improves.

The devastating earthquake in Haiti last week is spurring relief efforts from countries around the world, but the U.S. is playing a key role in providing both help and security, along with much-needed funds.

Calvetti, Ferguson & Wagner, P.C., a CPA and business advisory firm specializing in tax, audit and advisory solutions, sealed a partnership with global transactional concern Verse Consulting that will bolster its international tax offerings to mid-market companies.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers in Congress plan to introduce legislation that would allow individuals who make charitable contributions to help victims of the earthquake in Haiti to claim an itemized charitable deduction on their tax return this year instead of waiting until next year.