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SALT Blog - SALT Blawg

State and Local Tax Blog

SALT Blawg – State and Local Tax Blog

State and Local Tax ("SALT") blog issues require state and local tax knowledge. Chamberlain Hrdlicka's SALT Blawg (SALT Blog) provides exactly that knowledge with news updates and commentary about state and local tax issues.

You can expect to find relevant information about topics such as income (corporate and personal) tax, franchise tax, sales and use tax, property (real and personal) tax, fuel tax, capital stock tax, bank tax, gross receipts tax and withholding tax. SALT Blawg, offers tax talk for tax pros … in your neighborhood.

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  • Posts by Peter A. Lowy
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    Peter A. Lowy, a shareholder in Chamberlain Hrdlicka’s Houston office, is best known for his tax controversy work and deep experience in the energy sector. He also advises corporations and other taxpayers in a broad spectrum of ...

By Pete Lowy & Nga Tran-Medina

The officiant at your wedding probably didn’t conclude with: “I now pronounce you eligible to pay more in federal income taxes now that you’re husband and wife” (unless perhaps a Tax Court judge presided over your nuptials).  But maybe they should have.  It’s well known that married couples pay a “marriage penalty” – a general term for the various Code provisions and tax computations that make the total tax liability of spouses more than the sum of their individual tax liabilities if they had been allowed to file as being single.  

These ...

In every taxing jurisdiction in the United States, tax authorities may assert penalties if a taxpayer commits fraud.  This Blawg entry focuses on the Texas Comptroller’s view of its authority to impose fraud penalties, and considerations for taxpayers when seeking to fight fraud penalties that the Comptroller asserts.

Texas Tax Code § 111.061 authorizes the Texas Comptroller to impose a penalty in the amount of 50% of any underlying tax liability if the failure to pay the underlying tax or report such tax when due “was a result of fraud or an intent to evade the tax.”  This legal ...

Categories: Texas

To ring in the New Year, the Texas Comptroller announced needed guidance to remote sellers and marketplace facilitators regarding sales and use tax obligations for businesses that do not have a physical presence in Texas but sell or facilitate sales to Texas customers. 

In 2018, the US Supreme Court decided the case, South Dakota v. Wayfair, in which the Court altered the decades-long standard that prevented states from imposing sales tax obligations on businesses unless they had a physical presence in the state.  In Wayfair, the Court replaced the physical nexus standard with an ...

The SALT deduction cap, enacted by a Republican-controlled Congress in 2017, is a quagmire for Democrats.  They’ve made promises to repeal it, and have made a wedge issue out of it.  But repealing the cap would be regressive (it would benefit higher-income earners), which contradicts the party’s broader platform. 

Aside from repeal, leaders in the kill-the-cap campaign have sought to undo the SALT deduction cap by challenging its constitutionality in court and by enacting State statutes that seek to end-run the cap (known as “workaround statutes”).  But challenges to the ...

Categories: SALT, SALT Update

Since 2017 when the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act was enacted and placed a hard cap on state and local tax deductions, critics of the cap have campaigned to reverse it.  These critics (as well as the cap’s proponents) hail from every walk of life and political stripe.  But the mantel against the cap has been taken on most prominently by the Democratic Party and a handful of high-tax States that in recent election cycles have tended to vote Democrats into office, often labeled “Blue States.”  The efforts to overturn the cap have been three-fold: (1) state workaround statutes that seek to end-run the ...

Judicial review of agency action is a critical part of the fair administration of tax laws. Effective September 2021, two new procedures are available for taxpayers to seek judicial review of actions by the Texas Comptroller to either deny a refund claim or impose an assessment based on alleged tax deficiencies.

First, the Texas legislature created a refund claim superhighway for taxpayers. This was part of Senate Bill 903. Prior to the law change, taxpayers were required to exhaust certain administrative remedies including having their claim heard by the State Office of ...

A Texas appellate court handed down on August 13 reminds taxpayers that the Texas Comptroller refund procedures are laden with traps for the unwary. 

Comptroller Seeks to Dismiss Refund Suit

In the case, Hegar v. El Paso Elec. Co., the taxpayer, El Paso Electric, sued the Texas Comptroller for refund in district court on grounds that it had paid taxes on equipment that qualified for Tax Code section 151.318(a)(4)'s exemption for “telemetry units that are related to ... step-down transformers.”.  No. 03-18-00790-CV (Tex. App. Aug. 13, 2020).  The Comptroller pled that El Paso ...

The Internal Revenue Service is scheduled to publish its final regulations addressing attempts to end-run the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s cap on state and local tax deductions.

As readers will recall, prior to the TCJA’s amendment to Section 164 in December 2017, taxpayers were able to deduct the full amount of their state and local taxes (mostly property taxes and income taxes), subject to the limitation on itemized deduction.  The TCJA added Section 164(b)(6) which limits the aggregate deduction of these taxes to $10,000 (less if not filing a joint return).

This little provision ...