Insights & Developments

Under the Property Assessed Clean Energy program, localities lend homeowners the funds to install solar panels or to take other energy-saving measures, and the loans are repaid through an increase in property taxes and secured by tax liens. In this article, BNA takes a look at the controversy surrounding this popular program, which is currently hung up in a dispute among administration officials over state tax policy.

Paul H. Frankel, partner in Morrison & Foerster LLP and chairman of the BNA Multistate Tax Advisory Board, is a leading authority on state tax issues. Each year, he and his colleagues prepare this list of important issues in state taxation facing tax practitioners, with a focus on judicial developments. As in past years, nexus continues to be a hotly debated concept, along with disputes over apportionment and states' ongoing fascination with combined reporting.

The sales tax holiday is back in force in 2010, with 19 states announcing tax breaks on selected items, most of which are aimed at “back-to-school” shoppers. In this article, BNA takes a look at a new Tax Foundation report challenging the popular conception that the tax holiday is good for consumers and states' economies. 

Using independent contractors is attractive to employers for a host of economic reasons, but the current legal environment provides significant—and costly—consequences for errors in worker classification. The federal government and a number of states have intensified their efforts to prevent misclassification, including adopting legislation that imposes severe penalties for employers that fail to classify workers correctly. In this article, Morgan Lewis & Bockius attorneys Larry L. Turner and Joy F. Grese review recent federal and state initiatives to prevent misclassification of employees and provide checklists of best practices for creating and maintaining independent contractor relationships.