In this article, COST’s Karl Frieden and Doug Lindholm analyze California’s proposed digital advertising tax (DAT), comparing it with the existing Maryland DAT, and provide their rebuttal to Darien Shanske’s and Young Ran (Christine) Kim’s flawed characterization of and justification for the California DAT legislation as a digital barter tax. This article is a follow up to Frieden and Lindholm’s article on “State Digital Services Taxes: A Bad Idea Under Any Theory” that appeared in Tax Notes State on April 10, 2023.
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Now is a great time to start planning your conference attendance for 2025 and use any unspent budget dollars to register early!
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The Council On State Taxation (COST) and the State Tax Research Institute (STRI) are pleased to announce the release of the 22nd annual study of state and local business taxes. The report, “Total State and Local Business Taxes: State-by-State Estimates for Fiscal Year 2023,” prepared by Ernst & Young LLP, shows all state and local business taxes paid in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Businesses paid $1,096.2 billion in state and local taxes in FY2023, an increase of 3.7% from FY2022. State business taxes increased by 0.9%, and local business taxes grew by 7.3%. In FY2023, business tax revenue accounted for 44.7% of all state and local tax revenue.
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The COST Board was pleased to announce at COST’s 55th Annual Meeting in St. Louis last month that Deborah Bierbaum, former COST member and long-time friend of COST, is the recipient of the 2024 COST/Paul Frankel Excellence in State Taxation Award.
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In this article, COST’s Karl Frieden and Doug Lindholm analyze California’s proposed digital advertising tax (DAT), comparing it with the existing Maryland DAT, and provide their rebuttal to Darien Shanske’s and Young Ran (Christine) Kim’s flawed characterization of and justification for the California DAT legislation as a digital barter tax. This article is a follow up to Frieden and Lindholm’s article on “State Digital Services Taxes: A Bad Idea Under Any Theory” that appeared in Tax Notes State on April 10, 2023.
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COST is tracking state and local tax relief guidance in response to fires and other natural disasters.
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The Council On State Taxation (COST) and the State Tax Research Institute (STRI) are pleased to announce the release of the study, “Is e-invoicing relevant in the US state sales tax context?” This study, prepared by EY Quantitative Economics and Statistics Group (QUEST), explores the rise of e-invoicing in tax administration in dozens of value-added tax (VAT) systems around the world and analyzes e-invoicing from a U.S. state tax policy perspective. The study highlights key differences between VAT and U.S. state sales tax systems that make e-invoicing less relevant in the United States.
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In this article, Karl Frieden rebuts the central thesis of the Tax Notes State roundtables of Dan Bucks, Peter Enrich, Michael Mazerov, and Darien Shanske that business does not pay its fair share of state and local taxes. He does so by using their own criteria for measuring “fair share” based on deviations from optimal or neutral tax design to show that business “overpayments” of sales and excise taxes on business inputs and property taxes on business property are 15 times or more greater than the roundtable members’ assertion of business “underpayments” of state corporate income tax.
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We are pleased to share our latest paper documenting the harmful and unnecessary implications surrounding state adoption of mandatory worldwide combined reporting (MWWCR), by Douglas L. Lindholm and Marilyn A. Wethekam.
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COST’s Karl Frieden and Fred Nicely discuss how to design a sales tax system that exempts digital business inputs by looking back to states’ adoption of sales taxes in the 1930s and 1940s and the approaches to avoiding tax pyramiding in the manufacturing sector. This article is a follow up to the article Karl and Fred authored with Priya Nair on “Down the Rabbit Hole: Sales Taxation of Digital Business Inputs."
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The Council On State Taxation (COST) is pleased to release its 2023 Scorecard on state tax appeals processes and administrative practices. This eighth Administrative Scorecard continues to apply objective criteria to evaluate independence in tax appeals systems and key procedural elements that impact taxpayers’ perceptions of fairness and efficiency.
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The Council On State Taxation (COST) and the State Tax Research Institute (STRI) are pleased to announce the release of the 22nd annual study of state and local business taxes. The report, “Total State and Local Business Taxes: State-by-State Estimates for Fiscal Year 2023,” prepared by Ernst & Young LLP, shows all state and local business taxes paid in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Businesses paid $1,096.2 billion in state and local taxes in FY2023, an increase of 3.7% from FY2022. State business taxes increased by 0.9%, and local business taxes grew by 7.3%. In FY2023, business tax revenue accounted for 44.7% of all state and local tax revenue.
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COST's Karl Frieden and Fred Nicely examine how Minnesota’s new approach to taxing foreignsource income is unfair to U.S. multinationals, uncompetitive with other states, and likely violates the commerce clause based on U.S. Supreme Court precedents concerning discrimination, fair apportionment, and foreign commerce.
Read ArticleThis Spring Conference/Audit Session will bring multistate tax professionals, with various levels of experience in state and local income/franchise taxes and sales/use taxes together in an environment that allows for extensive interaction and exchange of information as well as updates on key SALT issues and insights regarding state tax trends and opportunities. The program is targeted to all level
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COST Welcomes Mark Holmes as New Tax Counsel; COST Opposes California Legislation Removing Tax Bar in False Claims Actions
COST Regional Meetings [Part I] – Planning for COST’s 2025 Regional Meetings is well underway. The current format includes lunch with a lunchtime speaker. Past lunch speakers at regional meetings have included representatives of state or local chambers of commerce or business associations, representatives from state or local revenue departments, and other state or local officials. To ensure attend
On November 19 COST filed a motion for leave to file an amicus brief at the South Carolina Supreme Court in support of Amazon Services LLC. Amazon Services LLC v. Department of Revenue. The Court of Appeals held that the Amazon. Services was in the business of selling tangible personal property and thus responsible for collecting and remitting sales tax on third-party sales made from the Amazon m
COST joined a CalTax coalition letter that supports SB 302, which would conform to federal law for taxable years after January 1, 2023, regarding the transferability and sale of federal environmental tax credits.