Sky Blog
To detect corporate misconduct, regulators frequently rely on firms’ employees, who are often privy to private information and the first to identify wrongdoing. To encourage employees and others to share what they know, many regulators have implemented whistleblower programs. Some …
Nonprofits organized under Section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) play an ever-growing role in politics and public policy advocacy. This is especially the case following the publication of the Federal Election Commission’s Advisory Opinion 2024-01 (available here), …
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) routinely monitors public companies to assess compliance with tax laws. The frequency of this monitoring is expected to increase significantly since the IRS recently announced its updated Strategic Operating Plan associated with the Inflation Reduction …
Carried interest is a special, or disproportionate-to-ownership, allocation of profits to the managers of a private equity (PE) or hedge fund partnership. While fund managers typically own about 2 percent of a fund, carried interest may allocate about 20 percent …
On March 7, 2024, in a speech before the American Bar Association, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced a “90-day sprint” to establish a new Justice Department whistleblower program. In her speech, Monaco pointed to other highly successful whistleblower …
On May 1, 2024, the IRS and the Department of the Treasury issued Rev. Proc. 2024-24 (the “New Rev. Proc.”), which establishes revised standards for taxpayers seeking private letter rulings on tax-free spin-offs, focusing in particular on, among other things, …
On April 12, 2024, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service published proposed regulations regarding the 1% excise tax on certain stock redemptions and economically similar transactions (corporate “repurchases”) by publicly traded U.S. corporations (“Covered Corporations”) on …
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) allows so-called “applicable entities” to elect to treat certain renewable energy tax credits as payments of federal income tax, generating a refund payment from the IRS (refundable tax credits or elective payment). Applicable …
In contrast to the volatility that vexed the economy in 2022, markets rose in 2023 as inflation fell and the labor market remained strong. Entering 2024, ongoing international instability, rapidly changing technology and the United States presidential campaign are certain …
In a new paper, we examine the extent to which cross-border M&A is influenced by tax avoidance motives and quantify the resulting tax savings.
Firms employ tax avoidance strategies like profit shifting or the relocation of their tax residence to …
On August 16, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (the “IRA”) (see our prior memo), which imposes a new 15% corporate book minimum tax (the “BMT”). The BMT is imposed, effective for taxable years beginning after …
The tax law handles many computational issues with extraordinary efficiency. Need to compute employment taxes? The Internal Revenue Code (“Code”) lays out the rate for doing so. Need to ascertain the dollar amount deductible for business mileage expenses? Treasury regulations …
Section 1061 of the Internal Revenue Code was enacted as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to create greater parity between the tax treatment of ordinary income and capital gains attributable to carried interest. The basic statutory …
Governance failures at for-profit corporations are the topic of frequent media stories, judicial opinions, and academic analyses. Nonprofit governance, however, has received significantly less attention. This lack of attention is not because nonprofits are immune from governance failures, and recent …
On July 31, the IRS and Treasury proposed regulations (the “Carried Interest Regulations”) on the taxation of carried interest under Section 1061 of the tax code. Section 1061 was added to the tax code as part of the 2017 tax …
On September 9, 2019, the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) released proposed regulations (the “Proposed Regulations”) that, if finalized in their current form, would in many cases dramatically reduce the portion of a company’s net operating loss …
Existing research provides limited insight into what draws the attention of tax authorities to public information and how that information is used in the process of examining corporate tax positions. For publicly traded firms in the U.S., the Internal Revenue …
Bill Gates, founder of software giant Microsoft, has suggested that robots be taxed, with the revenue generated used to educate and train the U.S. labor force. While Amazon’s Alexa has her own opinion (more on that in a moment), commentators …
On July 11, 2018, the US Department of the Treasury (Treasury) and the Internal Revenue Service (the IRS) issued final regulations (the Regulations) continuing efforts aimed at curbing cross-border corporate expatriation transactions — commonly referred to as inversions — and …
If there was ever a regulatory grace period for virtual currencies and blockchain technology, it is officially over. Five federal regulators—The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the US Treasury Department (FinCEN), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity Futures …