AMT - The S Corporation Association

Budget Targets Tax Gap

It is time to start a tally of how many times Congress spends revenues raised from closing the tax gap.

It’s an annual tradition. Each year, Congress picks out its favorite revenue raiser and then uses that revenue over and over again to pay for new spending or tax relief. Past contenders include overturning the Schmidt Baking decision, codification of the IRS’s economic substance test, SILOs, LILOs, COLI, etc. For 2007, the tax gap is the leading contender, and it’s already being used up.

As CongressDaily reported last week, the budget includes more than twenty “reserve funds” that allow for additional spending …

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admin2019-02-06T18:46:05+00:00March 20, 2007|

Tax Hikes under the Guise of Tax Relief?

Here’s more on what the House might be considering for its next tax bill this spring. As you’ll recall, last week they announced they would put forward a plan to address — that is, slow the growth of — the Alternative Minimum Tax among upper income taxpayers. This plan would be permanent, and would likely be offset with targeted tax increases elsewhere.

What would these targeted tax increases look like?

According to several sources, the Ways and Means Committee plans to lower the income thresholds applying to the 33 and 35 percent tax brackets. For married taxpayers filing jointly in 2006, the …

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admin2019-02-06T18:46:05+00:00March 13, 2007|

AMT Plan Imminent — House & Senate Moving in Different Directions

The Ways & Means held a hearing yesterday on the Alternative Minimum Tax. While there is broad consensus in the tax world that the AMT is broken, there is little common ground on exactly how to go about fixing it. To date, Congress and the Administration have confined their efforts to temporary, one or two year “patches” that raised the AMT exemption just enough to limit the growth of AMT taxpayers. The current higher exemption runs through 2006, however, so Congress needs to act in the next …

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admin2019-02-06T18:46:05+00:00March 8, 2007|

Energy Tax Bill and Energy Offsets

For those small business groups who are thinking that Big Oil will foot the bill for any energy tax title enacted this year, a new CRS report issued Tuesday provides little comfort.

The report, entitled “Oil and Gas Subsidies: Current Status and Analysis,” summarizes the current state of tax provisions targeted directly at the oil and gas industries. What they found is those tax “subsidies” are not as valuable as many people have assumed. As the report concludes:

“Although the above oil and gas tax subsidies may not be justified …

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admin2019-02-06T18:46:05+00:00March 2, 2007|

House Passes Small Business Tax Package — What’s the Next Step?

Real quick, the House just passed its small business tax package (H.R. 976) to accompany the proposed minimum wage increase, 360-45. This action follows a very bipartisan markup last Monday, where the tone of the hearing was a dramatic departure from what we’ve come to expect from Ways and Means meetings. That this comity occurred over a $1 billion package that included no S corporation provisions was a little disconcerting, but it is something we will have to work on.

So what’s the next step? The Senate could take up the House-passed …

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admin2019-02-06T18:46:06+00:00February 16, 2007|