Overview
White House Releases Economic Report of the President: Today, the White House released the Economic Report of the President. The report addresses business tax reform and President Obama's proposals. It also sets out and evaluates various proposals for business tax reform. The report states:
The President’s approach to business tax reform reduces disparities in tax rates across jurisdictions, across industries, across assets, across means of financing, and across different forms of business. In doing so, it encourages domestic investment and increases the quality of investment and productivity. Specifically, the approach broadens the tax base, lowers the top corporate rate, and reforms the taxation of income earned abroad. It moderates the incentives to shift profits to tax havens and encourages high-return domestic investment. This approach significantly simplifies the tax system for small businesses and corrects for externalities—benefits and costs that firms’ actions have on unrelated individuals. In addition, the one-time revenue that is generated by reform is used to fund a substantial, six-year increase in public infrastructure investment.
EU Privacy Regulators Discuss Risk, Safeguards in Tax Data Exchanges: The data protection authorities of the EU, represented by the Article 29 Working Party, stated that tax data exchanges must be accompanied by safeguards to ensure privacy protection. In a statement directed to national governments and EU institutions, the data protection authorities stressed that automatic exchange of personal data for tax purposes must meet data protection requirements, namely the principles of purpose limitation and necessity. They stated that they intend to issue further guidance, in particular, techniques to obtain more consistency at the EU level in order to limit the data protection liability risk of the member states tax authorities and to increase a more consistent approach on data protection within the EU.
Miscellaneous Guidance:
Notice 2015-13 provides guidance and transition relief for employers claiming the Work Opportunity Tax Credit. Specifically, it provides employers that hire members of targeted groups additional time beyond the 28-day deadline in Section 51(d)(13) for submitting Form 8850, Pre-Screening Notice and Certification Request for the Work Opportunity Credit.