Shaking things up in state and local tax
Shaking things up in state and local tax
By Olga Jane Goldberg and Open Weaver Banks
A Texas court ruled that natural gas stored in an underground reservoir is subject to property tax, whether or not the gas is in interstate commerce. Without actually deciding whether the natural gas was in interstate commerce, the Houston Court of Appeals (1st District) held that tax…
By Zachary Atkins & Jonathan Feldman
The Georgia Tax Tribunal held that the Texas Franchise Tax (the “TFT”) is a tax “on or measured by income” and allowed a Georgia resident, who indirectly owned an interest in a pass-through entity, to adjust his federal adjusted gross income for the amount of the entity’s income…
By Ted Friedman and Prentiss Willson
The Texas Comptroller determined that for Texas franchise tax purposes the apportionment factor of an out-of-state taxpayer engaged in the provision of technical training could not be adjusted to account for certain costs incurred in preparing and marketing the training sessions. The training sessions that were sold in Texas…
By Stephanie Do and Timothy Gustafson
The Texas Comptroller has filed a reply supporting its petition for review to the Texas Supreme Court in Titan Transp., LP v. Combs, 433 S.W.3d 625 (Tex. App. 3rd 2014). The taxpayer in Titan was in the business of hauling, delivering and depositing aggregate at construction sites, providing…
By Derek Takehara and Andrew Appleby
The Texas Comptroller determined that a semiconductor manufacturer’s purchases of computer software-related services were subject to sales and use tax because the taxpayer failed to prove that such purchases qualified for the multistate benefit exemption. Taxable services performed for use in Texas are generally subject to tax. Because some…
By Stephanie Do and Andrew Appleby
The Texas Comptroller determined that an integrated circuit manufacturer’s purchases of software tools used to design and test the software code embedded in its semiconductor chips did not qualify for the manufacturing exemption for sales and use tax purposes. For Texas’s manufacturing exemption, software manufacturing begins with software design…
By Nicole Boutros and Pilar Mata
The Texas Comptroller determined that a taxpayer’s “digitizing” services provided to oil and gas industry clients were taxable data processing services for Texas sales and use tax purposes. The services at issue consisted of taking well log data from the client; analyzing, manipulating and interpreting such data; and providing…
By Sahang-Hee Hahn and Pilar Mata
The Texas Comptroller has amended its regulation governing the sales tax treatment of cable television services. The revised regulation defines for the first time several terms related to the cable television services industry; adopts a destination-based sourcing rule for intrastate sales of streaming video; and taxes “bundled cable services.&rdquo…
By Madison Barnett and Jonathan Feldman
A Texas trial court denied a taxpayer’s claim that it was entitled to use the Multistate Tax Compact’s three-factor formula election for the Texas Margin Tax. The court’s order did not specifically address either the availability of the election or whether the tax meets the MTC’s definition of an…
By Madison Barnett and Timothy Gustafson
In the first appellate decision arising from a Texas Margin Tax audit, the Texas Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the taxpayer, holding that a combined group’s eligibility for the cost of goods sold (COGS) deduction is determined on a group-wide rather than a separate-entity basis. The Comptroller…
