The Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures of the House Ways & Means Committee holds a hearing today on Corporate Tax Reform. From the announcement:
The purpose of this hearing is to understand how tax-preference items within the corporate tax code reallocate the tax burden and whether these shifts are beneficial or detrimental to the U.S. economy. Of specific interest is to understand how the current system affects a company’s decision of where and how to invest in technology, equipment and people.
Here are the witnesses scheduled to testify:
Panel #1:
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Mihir Desai (Harvard Business School)
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Ronald Pearlman (Georgetown University Law Center)
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Thomas Neubig (National Director of Quantitative Economics and Statistics, Ernst & Young)
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Douglas Shackelford (University of North Carolina)
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Samuel Thompson (UCLA School of Law)
Panel #2:
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James Tisch (President and CEO, Loews Corp.)
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Matthew McKenna (Senior Vice President of Finance, PepsiCo, Inc.)
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John Castellani (President, Business Roundtable)
The hearing will take place in the main Committee hearing room, 1100 Longworth House Office Building, beginning at 2:00 p.m.
In connection with the hearing, the Joint Committee on Taxation has released Present Law and Background Relating to Corporate Tax Reform: Issues of Conforming Book and Tax Income and Capital Cost Recovery (JCX-16-06) (39 pages):
This document . . . provides an overview of business taxation in the United States and reviews the differences between income reporting for financial reporting purposes by domestic public corporations and income measurement for computing income tax liability. This document also provides a description of present law and background relating to capital cost recovery under the income tax.
The Tax Foundation has released several reports in conjunction with the hearing:
Economic considerations should guide decisions in the marketplace, not taxes. Unfortunately, the corporate tax system often distorts business decisions, making the economy less efficient. As lawmakers consider options for reform, they face several excellent reform proposals to choose from.
Recent data show a steep increase in corporate tax collections. These rising tax receipts give lawmakers an opportunity to enact rate-lowering, base-broadening tax reform—including much-needed integration of the corporate and individual tax systems.
In the early 1980s the personal income tax was mostly a wage tax. But in recent years it has also become a business tax. The reason? Rapid growth in S corporations and sole proprietorships as personal income tax rates have fallen in recent years.
