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By: Squire Patton Boggs

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Squire Patton Boggs
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Latest from The Public Finance Tax Blog

airport
On June 1, 2016, the New York Transportation Development Corporation issued over $2.25 billion in tax-exempt bonds as part of a public-private partnership to redevelop the Central Terminal building (known as Terminal B to passengers) at LaGuardia Airport in New York City.  As The Bond Buyer reported, the deal broke all kinds of records – it was the largest P3 ever, the largest airport transaction ever, and the largest AMT bond issue ever. In a ceremony…
The midterm elections are (mostly!) over. What’s coming next? No one is in a better position to tell you the answer than our Public Policy colleagues. Here for your reading and savoring are two pieces – a breakdown that spans all areas of law, and an analysis of what the election means specifically for tax policy. Click here for the big breakdown, and be sure to click “Download” to download the full .pdf. Click here …
The Opportunity Zone program was created by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and is intended to increase investment in areas designated as Opportunity Zones (i.e., economically distressed communities).  The general idea behind the program (which we have previously written about here) is that investors are able to defer paying tax on gains from selling property by investing the proceeds from the sale into an Opportunity Zone Fund. The IRS recently issued much…
For those who still had doubts, the IRS has now made it crystal clear: You can still issue tax-exempt bonds to advance refund most taxable bonds.  In other words, the much-lamented “repeal of tax-exempt advance refunding bonds” in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act from December 2017 isn’t ironclad. The repeal prevents the issuance of tax-exempt bonds to advance refund only (1) other tax-exempt bonds and (2) a very limited subset of taxable bonds.…
congressional
As readers of this blog know, the version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that was passed by the House of Representatives would not have allowed any private activity bond (including any qualified 501(c)(3) bond) to be issued as a tax-exempt bond after December 31, 2017.  The version of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed by the Senate, and the version ultimately enacted into law, did not include this repeal of tax-exempt private …
The IRS recently released a new Form 8038-G, which is the information return for issues of tax-exempt governmental bonds, and a new Form 8038, which is the information return for tax-exempt private activity bonds.  In addition, the IRS has released draft instructions for each form.  The revised forms are in part a response to changes made to the Internal Revenue Code by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (P.L. 115-97), which was signed into…
Hope you all had a nice summer – the blog is officially back from summer break. The Hutchinsons had a good one; we took Charlie to visit his grandparents at the beach in Pensacola, FL, where he went to Waffle House for the first time, and to visit his great-grandparents in Clinton, MS, where he went to Waffle House for the second time. Back to business. The House Ways and Means Committee released three bills yesterday,…
The IRS has released another “issue snapshot,” which deals with qualified mortgage bonds (or, as they are often called in our lingo, single-family housing bonds). An issuer uses the proceeds of qualified mortgage bonds to make loans to private homeowners. Because of the private loan limitation, the bonds are private activity bonds. To be tax-exempt, then, the bonds must meet all of the requirements for qualified mortgage bonds (which recapitulate most of the other…
When you enter into a closing agreement with the IRS to fix a problem with a tax-exempt bond issue, the IRS will often require a penalty payment in an amount relating to the “taxpayer exposure” on some or all of the bond issue. Taxpayer exposure “represents the estimated amount of tax liability the United States would collect from the bondholders if the bondholders were taxed on the interest they realized from the bonds during the…
The 2017 tax reform legislation created a new federal subsidy for investment in low-income communities, known as the “Opportunity Zone” program. (We previously covered it on the blog here.) The program allows taxpayers to defer gain from the sale of assets by investing the proceeds into an “Opportunity Fund,” which is a fund that invests in low-income communities that have been designated as “opportunity zones.” A few weeks after Congress enacted the program,…