Word: taxed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...David Meserve, the city council member who drafted the ordinance, says it was a pre-emptive strike in case the feds, using the Patriot Act as their legal authority, ever ask local police to serve a search warrant or order town record keepers to hand over tax records. "My oath of office is to uphold the Constitution," says Meserve. "The Patriot Act is unconstitutional...
...operates the Boston area mass transit system, including the subway, the trolleys, the buses and the commuter railroad—is a perennial money-loser. Fares are deliberately set below the break-even point in order to keep public transportation affordable for Boston’s poorest citizens; state tax revenues help keep the agency afloat. And with the state government facing a huge budget crisis, and the MBTA contemplating another fare hike, it is sheer folly to throw away $33 million to pay for land that the transportation secretary ultimately controls. Meanwhile, the MBTA is facing tougher budgets...
...could this happen? Three very realistic possibilities exist through regulatory, legislative or market channels. The newly constituted accounting board could propose and enforce this through the Securities and Exchange Commission. Congress could pass legislation that might please tax authorities, firms, and shareholders (how often does that happen?). Finally, a firm could voluntarily characterize their income in this way and stand out as a market leader. Regardless of the mechanism, financial reporting is a setting where reading off of the same page would prove to have numerous virtues...
This dual system has had a historic rationale. Separate tax books allow for differential accounting of expenses that can provide a fiscal policy tool without distorting the way in which income is reported to capital markets. While historically relevant, this argument has outlived its usefulness for several reasons. For starters, these different definitions of such expenses no longer account for much of the difference between book and tax income. Other factors—such as the peculiar accounting treatment of stock option compensation, differential treatment of overseas income, subsidiary income and pension obligations—account for large amounts...
...true that firms are forced to do some minimal reconciliation on their tax forms and accounting statements do contain well-buried footnotes that similarly try to reconcile these figures. Yet, these reconciliations provide very limited detail (in tax forms) or are completely opaque to even the most nuanced analysts (take a look at the tax footnotes of any major corporation). As such, a minimal solution would be the clarification and elaboration of these differences in public documents. More generally, a wholesale revisiting of the rationale for departing from book-tax conformity seems long overdue...