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Scott explains why companies have two separate accounting systems, one for reporting income to shareholders (GAAP), and one for reporting income to the IRS. He describes some pros and cons to taxing GAAP, as has been proposed by Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and others.

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We discuss some of the not-so-talked-about provisions in the Build Back Better tax plan, including (but not limited to) tax credits for journalists and ebikes, credits for electric vehicles, and some of the complications that arise when trying to provide tax incentives only under specific circumstances. We discuss tax credits, refundable credits, phase outs, tax incidence, and more.

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Jeff briefly discusses how much tax a socially responsible firm should pay. He explains that a dollar of tax paid might translate to one fewer dollar used for other socially responsible objectives.

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Scott describes how Salesforce.com used tax deductions from share-based compensation to reduce its U.S. tax bill to $0 despite reporting billions in profits to shareholders.

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We discuss the recent proposal for a billionaire's tax. We describe the tax, discuss how it could force the very rich to pay more in tax, and the possible complications of such a tax.

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We discuss the recently proposed 15% corporate minimum tax to be applied to financial accounting earnings. The idea was proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2019. At that time, we wrote several articles that were published in by various media outlets:

WSJ: https://www.wsj.com/articles/dont-let-warren-politicize-accounting-11557089967
The Hill: https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/439693-warrens-corporate-tax-solution-is-fundamentally-flawed

A few months later, 11 Senators wrote a letter to the FASB in favor of an accounting change that would improve tax enforcement. We wrote a letter to the FASB urging them to disregard any arguments for financial accounting changes that serve the objective of tax enforcement (the tax code can do this instead). The letters can be found on the last two links here: https://www.fasb.org/jsp/FASB/CommentLetter_C/CommentLetterPage&cid=1218220137090&project_id=2019-500

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We discuss the recently proposed removal of the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes. The restriction would largely benefit wealthy or high-income taxpayers in states with relatively high tax rates (California, New York, etc.)

More information can be found at www.taxchats.org