Reed Smith's Jennifer White will be speaking on the panel: "The Covid Gravy Train Has Been Exhausted – How Will States Balance the Budgets?"

Over the past few years, Covid has dominated our lives. States had to keep things going and federal funding helped to make that possible. But now with Covid behind us that federal funding has largely dried up. However, many of the states’ programs continue. As a result, states are now seeking revenue from other sources. The speakers in this session will cover the various ideas the states have come up with and their impacts on taxpayers. Curiously, even as the Covid funding disappears many states are reducing personal income taxes and/or residential property taxes (it is an election year after all) and finding replacement revenue from other tax sources (e.g., sales tax, DSTs, delivery fees). The speakers will also address those trends along with the litigation/legislation/compliance issues.

Reed Smith's Dave Gutowski will also be speaking on: "Beyond Population: How Companies Can Use Alternative Datasets and Methods to More Effectively Apportion Their Service Receipts"

The overwhelming trend for apportionment has been the transition to a single sales factor along with market sourcing for services. Whereas cost-of-performance focused on the taxpayer’s own activities, market sourcing requires taxpayers to consider their customers’ perspective. With limited information about customer usage or where benefits are derived, taxpayers often resort to estimates based on relative population or GDP. In this session, we’ll discuss how technology companies can use alternative datasets (including both internal datasets and 3rd party datasets) to more accurately apportion their services receipts. Using real-world examples, we’ll demonstrate how taxpayers can not only reduce their potential tax liability, but also make their compliance process more efficient. We’ll discuss how to identify and leverage 3rd party datasets such as retail data, financial data, and cell phone location data. We also discuss techniques and best practices for analyzing raw data, tools for visualizing the results, and telling an effective apportionment story.