SeeSALT Blog
The American Catalog Mailers Association (ACMA), which describes itself as the nation’s leading industry trade association advocating for catalog, online, direct mail, and other remote-selling merchants and their suppliers, has filed suit against the California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) in the San Francisco County Superior Court of California.
ACMA’s complaint seeks a judicial declaration that the FTB’s 2022 publicly-issued guidance related to Public Law 86-272 (PL 86-272) – specifically, Technical Advice Memorandum (TAM) 2022-01 and FTB Publication 1050 – are invalid because (1) they contradict PL 86-272 and the U.S. Constitution; and (2) the FTB did not properly follow the California Administrative Procedure Act’s required rulemaking process before publishing such guidance. In the alternative, ACMA seeks a judicial declaration that the FTB’s new guidance applies on a prospective basis only. ACMA also seeks attorney’s fees and costs of suit for bringing the action to enforce an important right affecting the public interest.
The legislation modifies the corporate income tax in three ways: (1) adopts a bright-line economic nexus standard; (2) adopts market sourcing for receipts from intangibles; and (3) reduces the corporate tax rate and gradually continues to reduce the rate over the next eight years. 
was not a facial violation of the U.S. Constitution but remanded the matter to create a factual record to evaluate an as-applied challenge to the tax.
The Texas Supreme Court issued a decision holding that service receipts are sourced to the physical location of the taxpayer’s personnel or equipment that performed the service for which the customer paid. The decision resolves disagreement regarding the proper interpretation of a Texas franchise tax apportionment statute that addresses the sourcing of service receipts. The statute sources a service provider’s receipts to Texas to the extent the service is “performed” in Texas. The taxpayer argued that its receipts from sales of satellite radio programming subscriptions were properly sourced to the location where its personnel and equipment performed the radio production and transmission services necessary for its radio programming (“origination sourcing”). The Comptroller interpreted the apportionment statute to source service receipts to Texas if the “receipt-producing, end-product act” takes place in Texas, which the Comptroller argued occurred where each subscriber’s radio received and decrypted the taxpayer’s radio signal (“destination sourcing”).
