We have been covering Oregon’s new Corporate Activity Tax (the “CAT”) over the past few months. As previously discussed, the Oregon Department of Revenue (the “Department”) has been conducting town hall meetings with stakeholders across Oregon. The last meeting was held in Salem on October 4, 2019.
In this post, we continue our coverage of the CAT with a discussion of the Department’s town hall meeting that Peter Evalds attended in Portland, Oregon on October 3, 2019. We address significant issues discussed at the Portland meeting that were not discussed at the Beaverton meeting we covered a few weeks ago.
What We Learned from one of the Oregon Department of Revenue’s Town Hall Meetings
Over the past few months, we have written extensively on the blog about Oregon’s new Corporate Activity Tax (the “CAT”). As announced in our last post, the Oregon Department of Revenue (the “Department”) is in the process of conducting town hall meetings with stakeholders across Oregon. Peter Evalds attended the Department’s town hall meeting in Beaverton, Oregon on Thursday, September 19, 2019. In this post, we highlight some of the more significant issues that were discussed at that meeting.
We have recently discussed in several blog posts Oregon’s new Corporate Activity Tax (“CAT”), a gross receipts tax that will become effective January 1, 2020. As we announced in our most recent post on this topic, the Oregon Department of Revenue (the “Department”) will soon commence the rule drafting process. In order to obtain input from taxpayers and tax advisors, it will hold town hall meetings around the state.
Yesterday, the Department announced the schedule of these meetings. Surprisingly, the first meeting is scheduled for tonight in Newport, and meetings will take place later this week in Corvallis and Beaverton. Additional meetings throughout the state will occur over the next few weeks. The meeting in Portland will take place at the Portland State Office Building in the Lloyd District on Thursday, October 3, 2019, from 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm.
As discussed in recent blog posts, the Oregon Legislative Assembly recently enacted a Corporate Activity Tax (“CAT”). Governor Kate Brown signed the legislation into law, effective January 1, 2020. Put in simplest terms, the CAT is a gross receipts tax on businesses with greater than $1 million of “commercial activity sourced to this state.”
Given the broadness of the new law and the many anticipated difficulties that taxpayers, tax advisors and the government will likely encounter determining what constitutes “commercial activity sourced to this state,” the need for the Oregon Department of Revenue (the “Department”) to adopt administrative rules on the new law is evident.
As we reported in our June 4 blog post, Oregon lawmakers had recently enacted a “corporate activity tax” (“CAT”) that applies to certain Oregon businesses. The new law, absent challenge, becomes effective January 1, 2020.
We also recently reported that a prominent group of Oregon businesses planned to challenge the CAT. It appears, however, that the momentum for a challenge has recently died.
In this blog post, we discuss the reasons causing the death of the challenge. In addition, we cover some technical changes in the new law that are currently awaiting Governor Kate Brown’s signature.
Earlier this week, a local tax practitioner asked us whether it was true that the City of Portland no longer allows depreciation deductions resulting from an election under Section 754 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986, as amended (the “Code”), for purposes of computing tax under the City of Portland Business License Tax (“BLT”) and the Multnomah County Business Income Tax (“BIT”). The answer we gave was “yes.” Of course, the response we received from the practitioner was “why.” That question is more difficult to answer than the original question. Nevertheless, we present this blog post to remind tax practitioners of the City’s position on this issue and to discuss the implications of the City’s new position.
We are taking a break from our multi-post coverage of Opportunity Zones to address a recent, significant piece of Oregon tax legislation.
On May 16, 2019, Governor Kate Brown signed into law legislation imposing a new “corporate activity tax” (“CAT”) on certain Oregon businesses. The new law expressly provides that the tax revenue generated from the legislation will be used to fund public school education.
Although the new tax is called a “corporate” activity tax, it is imposed on individuals, corporations, and numerous other business entities. The CAT applies for tax years beginning on or after January 1, 2020.
To help defray the expected increased costs of goods and services purchased from taxpayers subject to the CAT that will assuredly be passed along to consumers, the Oregon Legislative Assembly modestly reduced personal income tax rates at the lower income brackets.
New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced today that the state of New York, joined by the states of Connecticut, New Jersey and Maryland, have instituted a lawsuit against the federal government in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeking to strike the $10,000 cap imposed on the state and local tax (“SALT”) itemized deduction by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (“TCJA”) as unconstitutional.
The lawsuit, which specifically names Steven Mnuchin, U.S. Treasury Secretary and David Kautter, Acting Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, as defendants, asserts that the SALT cap (previously discussed in an earlier blog post) was specifically enacted by the federal government to target New York and similarly situated states, that it interferes with a state’s right to make its own fiscal decisions, and that it disproportionately adversely impacts taxpayers in those states.
On June 21, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed half a century of legal precedent in a landmark 5-4 decision, South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. Under prior law, a state was forbidden from collecting sales tax against out-of-state sellers unless the sellers had physical presence within the state (such as a business location, employees, or property).
The physical presence standard arose from a decision in a 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case, National Bellas Hess v. Department of Revenue of Illinois. In that case, the Court held that a mail-order company, whose only connection with customers in Illinois was by common carrier or U.S. mail, did not have sufficient connection with the state to warrant allowing it to tax the company. In 1992, the Court affirmed that holding in Quill Corp. v. North Dakota. The physical presence standard established by the Court in Bellas Hess and Quill has been a bright-line rule that presided over the rise of Internet commerce. That rule has now changed!
In November 2016, the Board of Commissioners of Cook County, Illinois, passed (by a slim margin of one vote) the Sweetened Beverage Tax Ordinance (“Soda Tax”). It imposed a tax at the rate of one-cent-per-ounce for all sweetened beverages sold at the retail level in the county.
The Soda Tax was expected to generate $200 million a year for Cook County. If you assume a population of 5.2 million in Cook County (home to the city of Chicago), the annual tax collections equate each citizen consuming over 10 ounces of sweetened beverages per day. That is an alarming figure. Factoring in visitors to the county, the number is likely a bit less than that figure, but nevertheless the number, or shall I say, “consumption assumption,” is definitely larger than one would expect.
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Larry J. Brant
Editor
Larry J. Brant is a Shareholder and the Chair of the Tax & Benefits practice group at Foster Garvey, a law firm based out of the Pacific Northwest, with offices in Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Washington, D.C.; New York, New York, Spokane, Washington; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Beijing, China. Mr. Brant is licensed to practice in Oregon and Washington. His practice focuses on tax, tax controversy and transactions. Mr. Brant is a past Chair of the Oregon State Bar Taxation Section. He was the long-term Chair of the Oregon Tax Institute, and is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the Portland Tax Forum. Mr. Brant has served as an adjunct professor, teaching corporate taxation, at Northwestern School of Law, Lewis and Clark College. He is an Expert Contributor to Thomson Reuters Checkpoint Catalyst. Mr. Brant is a Fellow in the American College of Tax Counsel. He publishes articles on numerous income tax issues, including Taxation of S Corporations, Reasonable Compensation, Circular 230, Worker Classification, IRC § 1031 Exchanges, Choice of Entity, Entity Tax Classification, and State and Local Taxation. Mr. Brant is a frequent lecturer at local, regional and national tax and business conferences for CPAs and attorneys. He was the 2015 Recipient of the Oregon State Bar Tax Section Award of Merit.
