The recently signed tax compromise bill-also unofficially known as Stimulus II-not only contains a two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts for everyone, including those who don't want it except for the politicians who obsessively pushed for it. It also included about 50 or so tax breaks for businesses.
I already detailed the bonus depreciation and R&D tax credit.
However, as usual there are many more targeted ones for the industries whose lobbying did the best j [...]
New research from the UK shows how the rapid swings in currency valuations are having a negative effect on exports.
The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) recently released a report on the prospects for export growth in the SME sector. It surveyed nearly 2000 small businesses in the UK and found that almost half - some 48 percent - were put off exporting by fluctuating exchange rates.
The report also found that a third of respondents were [...]
The last Saturday before Christmas is usually one of the biggest shopping days of the calendar in the UK. This year, companies were hit with two problems one of which was entirely new and one which is as old as shopping itself.
The cold weather caused chaos in Britain and deterred many shoppers. But less predictably, a new source of concern is a wave of protests targeting some of the UK's biggest firms. The protests focus on those companies which are thought to use tax-avoidan [...]
While much of the focus of the pending tax cut package seems to be on the reductions and breaks for individuals, there are some goodies tucked in for corporations as well.
They include a two-year extension of the research and development credit, which covers employment costs of employees involved in research, and $22 billion for accelerated depreciation, which allows companies to write off all of their costs of assets placed in service after September 8, 2010 and through December [...]
This blog has long contended that one of the benefits of the financial crisis is that governments around the world are bending over backwards to improve the conditions in which private sector companies do business. On Monday we reported on the UN's Doing Business report which corroborated this view with comprehensive figures from around the world.
But it is not just emerging markets. The UK's new coalition government has made being business friendly a cornerstone of its e [...]
Executives have a number of concerns as they gear up to comply with the Internal Revenue Service's new disclosure requirement regarding their uncertain tax positions (UTPs).
According to a survey conducted by KPMG's Tax Governance Institute (TGI), 44 percent of the respondents said their biggest concern was providing the concise description for a disclosed UTP. The IRS defines a UTP as a federal income tax position for which a taxpayer or related party has recorded a reser [...]
A rumor currently making the e-mail rounds would-if true-be especially devastating to small business owners. Good thing it is not true.
However, the hysteria among those who have received the e-mail is another reminder of how the internet can be misused and abused.
Here's the deal. A friend stopped me to warn that after the election "Obama is going to tax every bank transaction by 1 percent. Every deposit, funds transfer, withdrawal. Everything."
I w [...]
An intriguing report from the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) in the UK suggests that 74 percent of small business owners want less government spending. And that includes spending on schemes to support small businesses.
The FSB's annual Voice of Small Business Survey of 1,304 small businesses has shown overwhelming support for the UK government's efforts to cut spending and rein in the deficit. In the spirit of responsibility, many of those businesses feel that [...]
What do a building supplies company that began life as a maker of sheep shearing tools and Europe's largest bank have in common? Both have plans to leave the UK to escape what many companies see as an iniquitous tax situation.
Wolsey--the 123 year-old British company that has morphed from farm equipment, to car manufacturing to now being a building supplies merchant--announced today that it would be moving its tax headquarters from the UK to Switzerland. The company wil [...]
Call it a victory for the venture capital industry.
Unlike other alternative investment firms such as private equity funds and hedge funds, under the new financial regulation bill venture capital funds are not required to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission if they have at least $150 million under management.
The industry's main lobby group, the National Venture Capital Association, successfully argued that venture capital firms are too small to be systema [...]
Submitted by Caleb Newquist, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.
There are plenty of businesses out there that simply don't have a plan. They may have a sign in the window, products on their shelves and a room full of "keepers" but not much else.
Trieu Le and Baymone Thongtheposmphou, on the other hand, had a plan. When Le's company moved to Costa Rica in 2005, he opted to turn his focus towards professional gambling. [...]
Venture capital fundraising in the US is at the lowest level in seven years and the likelihood that it will significantly increase in the next few years is slim.
Thirty eight US venture capital funds raised $1.9 billion in the second quarter of 2010, the worst three-month period since the third quarter of 2003, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association.
It also marks a 49 percent decline, in dollar commitment, compared to the first quarter of 2 [...]
A survey released today by the Association of Financial Professionals will do nothing to dampen the austerity versus stimulus debate.
To wit: Forty-three percent of US corporations had larger US cash and short-term investment holdings this May than they did six months earlier. Only 24 percent of respondents reported that their short-term holdings had shrunk during the past six months.
In a press release accompanying the findings, the AFP described finance executives [...]
The emergency budget unveiled by the UK government on Tuesday was unashamedly pro-business, giving British businesses everything they could have wanted. While the headlines have focused on the drastic cuts to public spending that the budget outlined, a more subtle trend was the way in which the tax burden has shifted from companies to individuals.
The key area affecting most businesses was the reduction in the main rate of corporation tax to 27 percent this year and then by a fur [...]
Details are finally starting to emerge about the new UK coalition government's business and fiscal policies. CFOs are watching closely in two key areas: taxation and banking. But disagreement between the two coalition partners remains, leaving key areas of uncertainty.
On corporation tax, a planned 3 percent reduction in the main and smaller rates announced by incoming Chancellor George Osborne is planned to go ahead in the upcoming emergency budget. The main rate of 30 perce [...]
Lost in the hubbub over the end of the GOP filibuster of bank reform and Goldman Sachs' role in the crisis that spawned the need for it is the news that Tim Geithner's spine has stiffened on what exactly to do. Or at least that's how I read this Times article.
I'm talking about Geithner's position on the so-called bank tax. Several months ago, he threw cold water on the idea of a special levy on banks, despite pressure for such a tax from his European counterparts.
The way I read this Felix Salmon column posted yesterday, it sounds like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank are counting on the Treasury to let banks traffic in operating losses, which is normally against IRS rules.
According to the column, which is based on a report in the Financial Times, banks such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank have been touting new product ideas to banks that will be hit by new international capital rules known as Basel III.
The FT [...]
To hear a small business tax consultant tell it, the IRS is making up for a decline in big company audits by examining the hell out of smaller companies that can least afford it.
To hear the IRS tell it, at least to the New York Times, the basis for such a claim is erroneous.
No question, the numbers reported in a study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a non-partisan research group affiliated with Syracuse University, look pretty scary for small business, the so- [...]
The brouhaha over the hits to earnings from the new health-care law that companies are announcing is much ado about very little.
First of all, the charge is an estimate of future costs and will have no immediate impact on cash flow. And the estimate is unusually large because the accounting rules require costs that would otherwise be reported in the future to be reported now, simply because they are the result of a change in tax treatment.
As my former colleague Marie Leone repor [...]
At the risk of seeming terribly politically incorrect, I highly recommend taking a look at this paper published today by the Economic Policy Institute, which argues that further government stimulus is necessary for the economy to recover.
Essentially, authors Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz argue that prospects for new hiring are so dismal because of productivity gains in recent years that it will take much higher GDP growth than anyone reasonably expects to bring unemployment dow [...]