As if the IRS weren’t reeling enough already, today the unanimous Supreme Court dealt the beleaguered agency another blow, unanimously ruling that companies who paid a British “windfall tax” could get credit for that payment against their U.S. tax liabilities. This should’ve been a simple case, and the federal tax court got it right – the tax code credits foreign income taxes – but the court of appeals found a convoluted way to rule for the IRS.
As Cato’s brief explained, however, taxpayers have the right to be free from double taxation and here the IRS improperly disregarded the substance of the windfall tax. A foreign tax’s form or label can’t mask its substantive character for legal purposes. American businesses operating overseas should be able to rely on a stable, substantive application of U.S. tax law instead of arbitrary interpretations and constructions manipulated to generate payments to the IRS.
No comments:
Post a Comment