Tax Blog/Blawg

A little over a month ago, our guest commentator, Dave Bernard, pointed out that a significant number of multinational companies have built up large stockpiles of cash in low-tax jurisdictions around the world.  While these stockpiles had been noticed by various journalists, Dave explained that the persistence of these stockpiles could largely be explained by U.S. tax policy, which discourages companies from repatriating cash earned abroad due to the earnings impact of bringing the money back to the U.S.

TaxBlawg’s Guest Commentator, David L. Bernard, is the recently retired Vice President of Taxes for Kimberly-Clark Corporation, a past president of the Tax Executives Institute, and a periodic contributor to TaxBlawg.

The financial press can’t stop talking about the amount of cash on corporate balance sheets. Journalists and arm-chair analysts alike point to the $1.84 trillion in cash on the balance sheets of non-financial U.S. companies as a reason to be bullish on the stock market, figuring that eventually cash-rich companies will splurge on dividends and stock buy-backs, if not on pursuing growth opportunities. There’s probably truth to that, but there is also a good chance that some of the cash will never be spent. Why? Because much of this largesse has been earned outside the United States in low tax jurisdictions, and repatriating this would cost billions in cash taxes and earnings.

The Chief Tax Officer (“CTO”), CFO and Corporate Treasurer have many discussions on the desire to return cash to the U.S. and the amount of the resulting “hit” to income that would result. Some companies may have more of a tolerance for the reduction in earnings per share attendant with repatriation of low taxed earnings than others, but the growth in cash in corporate balance sheets suggests that earnings per share still trumps the desire to return cash to the U.S. when the tax burden is too great.

The House of Representatives passed, and the President signed into law, H.R. 1586, the "FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act," which curiously became the chosen vehicle for Congress and the Administration to provide assistance to states with budget shortfalls while paying for that assistance with changes in a number of international tax provisions.  The final bill is available in pdf here.  See here for our prior summary of the relevant international tax provisions.

Although the changes are largely similar to what was proposed in earlier legislation, it ...

Although death and taxes might, according to Benjamin Franklin, be the only certainties in this world, Congress is surely striving to add another - that is, the certainty of uncertainty.  Congress, it seems, is committed to keeping taxpayers in as much doubt as possible for as long as possible about the status of a variety of important provisions that will affect both substantive tax liabilities and compliance obligations.

If you haven’t memorized the 433 pages of the latest version of the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act of 2010 (undoubtedly named to allow for the euphonious acronym, AJACTLA), you are denying yourself a unique treat.  (To get the true flavor, don’t forget the fifteen pages of amendments included with the House passage of the bill on May 28.)  We will allow others to give you a full rundown of the 206 sections of the bill and content ourselves with a summary of the highlights.

Adding a new wrinkle to this fiscal crisis is Greece's inability to use monetary policy to resolve the problem.  Historically, nations faced with unmanageable sovereign debt have often simply printed more money, thereby creating inflation, which reduces the real value of the government's typically fixed-rate debt.  As a member of the European Monetary Union, however, Greece does not have this option.  As a result, an increasing chorus of commentators and public officials have been asking whether Greece might be forced to take a "holiday" from the Monetary Union or, even worse ...