#tax-parity

#tax-parity

Trillions flow into the United States government on Tax Day, yet a significant share is directed toward war and defense contractors, rather than essential services.

Britain's tax wedge, which estimates total taxes on labour paid by employees and employers, minus cash benefits received by working households, increased by 2.45 percentage points last year, the most in the OECD.

The Government is considering the possibility of enhanced tax credits for multinational companies, which include major players like Apple, Eli Lilly, and Microsoft.

Financial planners face numerous challenges during tax season, including correcting misclassified stock options and saving clients substantial amounts that tax software inaccurately calculated. These experiences highlight the complexities of tax filing and the importance of professional guidance.

The rich have made an art of avoiding taxes and making sure their wealth passes down effortlessly to the next generation. But the tricks they use - to expedite payouts to heirs and avoid handing money to the government - can also work for people with far more modest estates. "It's a strategic game of chess played over decades," says Mark Bosler, an estate planning attorney in Troy, Michigan, and legal adviser to Real Estate Bees.

For high-net-worth individuals who declare residence in low- or non-tax jurisdictions such as Florida, Texas, or Puerto Rico, yet continue to circulate between New York, California, Illinois, and other high-tax states, the answer increasingly runs through software. Most tax tracking apps were launched in the 2010s, but they gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic as remote work expanded dramatically.

The key to selling underperforming holdings at a loss and using those losses to cancel out capital gains on a dollar-for-dollar basis is to bring one's capital gains level down as close as possible to zero. Additionally, it's possible to use $3,000 of capital losses per year to offset other ordinary income, so there's the potential here with such a strategy to actually lower one's overall tax burden by selling the right securities at the correct time.

"We are still in the early days of the so-called great wealth transfer," says the lawyer Pierre Valentin, the joint head of art law at Fieldfisher. "The wave started in the US with the sale of collections such as those of Sydell Miller, Mica Ertegun and more recently, Leonard Lauder. The wave is coming to Europe, for example with the auction of the collection of Pauline Karpidas [last] September. I expect that there will be many more of those 'white glove' sales in the next 10 to 15 years because younger collectors collect differently from their parents and grandparents."