Tax Cuts and Jobs Act

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Over the past few months, the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) has imposed civil penalties in the hundreds of thousands of dollars against multiple publicly traded corporations in connection with their failure to disclosure certain perquisites and personal benefits provided to senior executive officers, including travel, lodging and entertainment fringes and expenses.

On October 7, 2020, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) and Treasury Department released final regulations[1] providing guidance on the rules imposing withholding and reporting requirements under the Code[2] on dispositions of certain partnership interests by non-U.S. persons (the “Final Regulations”). The Final Regulations expand and modify proposed regulations[3] that were published on May 13, 2019 (the “Proposed Regulations”), and which we described in a prior Tax Talks post.[4] Unless otherwise specified, this post focuses on the differences between the Proposed Regulations and the Final Regulations affecting transfers of interests in non-publicly traded partnerships.

Enacted as part of the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” Section 1446(f) generally requires a transferee, in connection with the disposition of a partnership interest by a non-U.S. person, to withhold and remit ten percent of the “amount realized” by the transferor, if any portion of any gain realized by the transferor on the disposition would be treated under Section 864(c)(8) as effectively connected with the conduct of a trade or business in the United States (“Section 1446(f) Withholding”).[5]

Prior to issuing the Proposed Regulations, the IRS had issued Notice 2018-08 and Notice 2018-29 to provide interim guidance with respect to Section 1446(f) Withholding.

On June 24, 2020, the Internal Revenue Service (the “IRS”) and the U.S. Department of Treasury (“Treasury”) issued final regulations (the “Final Regulations”) on the application of the “passthrough deduction” under Section 199A[1] to regulated investment companies (“RICs”) that receive dividends from real estate investment trusts (“REITs”). The Final Regulations broadly allow a “conduit” approach, through which RIC shareholders who would have been able to benefit from the deduction on a dividend directly received from a REIT can take the deduction on their share of such dividend received by the RIC, so long as the shareholders meet the holding period requirements for their shares in the RIC. This confirms the approach of proposed regulations issued in February 2019 (the “Proposed Regulations”), on which RICs and their shareholders were already able to rely. Additionally, the preamble to the Final Regulations (the “Preamble”) notes that the IRS and Treasury continue to decline to extend conduit treatment to qualified publicly traded partnership (“PTP”) income otherwise eligible for the deduction. Please read the remainder of this post for background, a description of the technical provisions of the Final Regulations, and a brief discussion of policy issues discussed in the Preamble.

On April 11, 2019, the Internal Revenue Service (the “IRS”) issued Revenue Procedure 2019-18, creating a safe harbor that allows professional sports teams to treat trades of personnel contracts (including contracts for players, coaches and managers) and draft picks as having a zero value for determining gain or loss…

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act enacted section 1400Z-2 of the Internal Revenue Code, which created the qualified opportunity zone program. The program is designed to encourage investment in distressed communities designated as “qualified opportunity zones” by providing tax incentives to invest in “qualified opportunity funds” (“opportunity funds”) that, in…

The Internal Revenue Service has published Notice 2018-68 (the “Notice”), which provides long awaited, but limited guidance on the recent amendments to Section 162(m) of the Internal Revenue Code (“Section 162(m)”) by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (the “TCJA”). Specifically, the…

A number of states have recently proposed or passed new laws related to state-level taxation, some of which are taxpayer-friendly and some of which are expected to impose additional tax burdens on taxpayers. They vary in subject from efforts by states to mitigate the new federal limitation on the deductibility of state and local taxes to proposed changes to state income taxation of “carried interest.” This update reflects some of those recent proposals and laws.

On Friday December 22, 2017, the President signed into law H.R.1, commonly referred to as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). This is the most sweeping change to the US federal income tax laws in over three decades, and it will affect every US taxpayer, including participants in the capital markets. The purpose of this blog post is to focus on some of the provisions of the TCJA that will impact interest bearing debt, including leveraged loans and high-yield bond offerings. For background and a more detailed discussion of the TCJA provisions generally, please see, House of Representatives and Senate Conferees Reach Agreement on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (H.R. 1).

H.R. 1, commonly referred to as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, implements sweeping changes to the U.S. tax system. These changes will alter the fundamental tax principles upon which many investment and organizational decisions by the private investment industry were made.

Lawyers in our Tax and Private Investment Funds…