Talking Tax

L.G. "Chip" Harter is spearheading the Treasury Department's implementation of the international provisions of the 2017 tax law. He said the department aims to finish this by October.Harter spoke with Bloomberg Tax reporter Isabel Gottlieb at Bloomberg Tax's 2020 Outlook on Tax event in Washington. Harter spoke about a Senate inquiry into Treasury's rulemaking process and he also addresses what's next for U.S. negotiations on tax treaties after the Senate finally broke a decade-long treaty logjam last year.

Google, Facebook, and other tech giants have too much market power and way too much information about all of us. That's the opinion of lots of political figures, as well as of Nobel economist Paul Romer. What makes Romer different is his preferred way of dealing with this problem: taxes.U.S. states would be the best place to start, Romer says. He speaks with Bloomberg Tax correspondent Michael Bologna on the latest episode of Talking Tax.

This week, we're sharing an episode of the newest weekly podcast from Bloomberg Industry Group, Downballot Counts. It's a podcast about the 2020 U.S. House and Senate elections and the fight to control Congress. The series is hosted by Bloomberg Government Senior Elections Reporter Greg Giroux and Elections Team Leader Kyle Trygstad. Subscribe to Downballot Counts wherever you get your podcasts.

Some of the biggest investment funds—Ares Management Corp., KKR & Co. Inc., and others—converted from partnerships to C corporations after Congress slashed the corporate tax rate in the 2017 tax law. But conversions aren’t for everyone, not by a long shot.Jeremy Swan, managing principal at CohnReznick in New York, talks about the pros and cons, the questions that businesses should ask themselves, and the political uncertainties right now that signal the wisdom of a “wait and see” approach to further conversions.

Patriotic Millionaires isn’t just about advocating higher taxes for the wealthy, as Chair Morris Pearl discussed in a recent Talking Tax episode. The group also thinks fairness requires multinational companies to pay tax in the countries where their sales revenue comes from, and they should disclose how much tax they pay in each country.In this episode, Pearl talks with host Amanda Iacone about these issues and why corporate political spending is a problem.

Morris Pearl is somewhat encouraged by all the talk about wealth taxes these days. The Patriotic Millionaires, which he chairs as a volunteer job, has “made a lot of progress in moving the needle” toward its argument for taxing the rich more and paying people more equitably.Pearl, who made his wealth initially at BlackRock Inc., talks with Bloomberg Tax’s Amanda Iacone about the wealth tax proposals, legislation to tax investment income at the same rate as earned income, the “ridiculous” carried interest tax benefit for fund managers, and more.

House committees, among others, have been trying to get President Donald Trump’s tax returns and other financial documents, and have turned to the courts to enforce the effort. Why doesn’t Congress use its own enforcement?Cornell law professor Josh Chafetz thinks the legislative branch has ceded too much power to the judicial branch. He points to the Nixon tapes effort in the 1970s as a significant turning point, when Congress went to courts for the first time in an information dispute with the executive branch. He talks with Bloomberg Tax legal reporter Aysha Bagchi about the arguments he makes in his book, Congress’s Constitution, and speculates on how the cases may play out.

Talking Tax embarks on the 2020s with a lively conversation about how tax policy evolved through the 2010s.Bloomberg Tax law analyst Mary Gillmarten, a veteran of government and private-practice work, reviews the decade’s major developments—especially how the U.S. and other countries started tackling globalization and the digitalized economy. And she has thoughts about implications for our future.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is going into 2020 with some of its most complex work ever: shepherding efforts for a global rewrite of corporate taxation systems in the digital economy.Host Siri Bulusu spoke with Bloomberg Tax reporter Isabel Gottlieb about issues the OECD is facing and implications for countries and companies.

U.S. Supreme Court justices turned their attention this term to a long-standing federal common law rule—the Bob Richards rule—that courts have used to determine who gets a tax refund in cases involving a parent company’s bankruptcy.Bloomberg Tax legal reporter Aysha Bagchi sits down with host Siri Bulusu to describe the controversy and walk through the lively Dec. 3 oral arguments in the case, Rodriguez v. FDIC.