On October 24, 2018, the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration ("CDTFA") held a stakeholder's meeting to discuss the impact of South Dakota v. Wayfair on use tax collection in California. Among those at the meeting from the CDTFA were Nicolas Maduros (Director), Trista Gonzalez (Chief of Tax Policy), and Robert Tucker (Assistant Chief Counsel). For the majority of the meeting the CDTFA fielded questions from attendees. During the course of the meeting, the CDTFA explained its planned response to Wayfair. California Rev. & Tax. Code Section 6203(c) states that California's sales [...]Read more

Clark Calhoun explores the implications of a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court in an article published in IPT Insider. (See p. 10 of the linked document.) In Comptroller of the Treasury of Maryland v. Wynne, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Maryland’s income tax credit scheme unconstitutional, holding that the state’s failure to provide a full credit for the state and local taxes paid to other states was internally inconsistent and, therefore, violated the dormant Commerce Clause. Calhoun's article focuses on a similar tax credit issue, the constitutionality of which seems highly suspect [...]Read more

The impact of the burden of proof on state tax appeals cannot be overstated.  Taxpayers often lose tax appeals on the basis that they failed to satisfy the seemingly elusive burden of proof. Apart from limited instances in the arena of alternative apportionment, taxpayers bear the burden of proof in nearly every state tax appeal.  As the reasoning goes, taxpayers should bear the burden of proof because it is the taxpayers that possess the necessary information and, thus, are in the best position to establish the proper amount of state tax liability.  But should this always be the case? In [...]Read more

For decades, the determination of whether debt issued between related parties should properly be characterized as equity has provided grounds for frequent disputes between taxpayers and the Treasury Department and the IRS (together, “the government”). Congress attempted to address this issue through the enactment of IRC § 385(a) (as part of the Tax Reform Act of 1969), which authorizes the Treasury Department to prescribe regulations as necessary or appropriate to determine whether an interest in a corporation should be treated as debt or equity. However, the government had not done so – [...]Read more

Few laws, if any, have had a bigger impact on a state’s taxing authority than California’s Proposition 13 (Prop 13). Famously passed in 1978 amidst a housing market boom, Prop 13 was intended to protect taxpayers from dramatic rises in their annual property tax bills by limiting the ad valorem taxes on real property to 1 percent of the full cash value of the property at acquisition, with a 2 percent annual cap on assessment increases. Perhaps the most friction-laden aspect of Prop 13 is the ‘‘change in ownership’’ requirement.  Prop 13 permits local assessors to reassess tax based [...]Read more

On February 18, 2016, Sprint Communications Inc. filed a petition for a writ of certiorari asking the United States Supreme Court to review the New York Court of Appeals’ denial of Sprint’s attempt to dismiss the approximately $400 million sales tax case brought against it under New York’s False Claims Act (“FCA”). In its October 20, 2015, denial, the Court of Appeals held that: (1) the attorney general’s complaint sufficiently pleaded a cause of action under the state FCA that Sprint knowingly filed false tax records with the state, (2) New York tax law unambiguously imposes sales [...]Read more