The United States is facing an orphan and uncapped oil well crisis. Orphaned wells are those that have no known owner to assume liability. Uncapped wells are oil wells open to the elements and can potentially leak methane, contaminate groundwater, and threaten public health. The Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission puts the number of undocumented orphaned wells at between 310,000 and 800,000—these are wells that are thought to exist but haven’t even been positively identified yet and thus may or may not be capped. The Environmental Defense Fund has assembled a map of more than 120,000 identified uncapped orphaned…

January is a good time to consider tax planning for your income in 2025. It’s before tax-return season puts your focus on last year’s income. It also comes before the likely bustle over tax legislation by the new Republican White House and Congress: they must decide whether to extend the current tax code, introduced in 2018 by the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act, which expires after 2025. In this calm before those storms, take a moment to understand the federal tax-related numbers for 2025 that are crucial for you. Where to begin? The IRS and the Social Security Administration annually…

In this episode of Tax Notes Talk, Tax Analysts Chief Operating Officer Jeremy Scott reviews the 2024 developments in U.S. tax legislation and speculates what may lie ahead in 2025. Tax Notes Talk is a podcast produced by Tax Notes. This transcript has been edited for clarity. David D. Stewart: Welcome to the podcast. I’m David Stewart, editor in chief of Tax Notes Today International. This week: 2024 wrap-up. We’re continuing our tradition at the start of the new year of reviewing what happened in U.S. tax policy and looking ahead to what we can expect in the next 12…

In 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote to the French scientist Jean-Baptiste Leroy: “Our new Constitution is now established, everything seems to promise it will be durable; but, in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” Back then, there was no income tax – the federal government was funded mostly by taxes on imports, determined and paid when goods were brought into the country. What Franklin was resigned to is the payment of taxes. Fast forward more than 230 years, that’s still how many people think about taxes though our federal tax system has evolved. Taxpayers today bear distinct obligations…

The annual IRS priority guidance plan (PGP) lays out key areas for Treasury and the IRS. Comparing the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 PGPs yields clues about what to expect in 2025. The initial PGP is published annually in the fall. It contains a list of priority guidance projects that have received, or will receive, focus from the preceding July 1 through the following June 30. The 2024-2025 PGP, released October 3, 2024, lists 231 guidance projects, while the 2023-2024 PGP, released September 29, 2023, lists 237 guidance projects. The initial PGP for any year is typically followed by three quarterly updates.…

EN 16931 is the European standard for electronic invoicing, published in April 2017 by the European Committee for Standardization. It was developed to address the need for a unified framework for transmitting electronic invoices to public authorities across the European Union. This initiative was driven by Directive 2014/55/EU, which mandates the use of electronic invoices in public procurement processes. The standard outlines specifications for invoice content, defining the mandatory and optional elements that an e-invoice must or may include, and provides guidance on structuring these elements within machine-readable XML formats. EN 16931 is set to play a pivotal role in…

This is a published version of our weekly Forbes Tax Breaks newsletter. You can sign-up to get Tax Breaks in your inbox here. As 2024 came to a close, it refused to go quietly. Two significant court challenges were introduced at the end of the year with the potential to shake up the 2025 tax season. First, as I reported in last week’s newsletter, the IRS published final regulations on information reporting obligations for certain DeFi participants (as a reminder, DeFi refers to peer-to-peer financial services on the blockchain). Almost immediately afterward, a lawsuit was filed in the Northern District…

The Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service have recently reaffirmed their strong commitment to pursuing offshore tax evasion through the use of powerful investigative tools. One such tool is the IRS John Doe Summons. On December 23, 2024, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York granted the IRS authority to serve a John Doe Summons on Nevis Services Limited, a Trident Trust Group affiliate based in New York City. Trident Trust is one of the world’s largest independent corporate and trust service providers. The summons seeks information about U.S. taxpayers who may have…

Months ago, I advised that the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) could be headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The first bite at that apple happened this week. On December 31, the Department of Justice filed a petition asking the nation’s highest court to put the brakes on the nationwide preliminary injunction that had barred the government from enforcing beneficial ownership information (BOI) reporting. If the DOJ’s request is granted, the government can enforce the CTA while appeals make their way through the system. In the application for a stay of the injunction filed with the Supreme Court, the government argued…

Germany’s mandatory e-invoicing system will be implemented in phases, with Phase One beginning January 1, 2025. During this initial phase, businesses conducting domestic business-to-business (B2B) transactions must be able to receive structured electronic invoices that comply with the EU e-invoicing standard EN 16931. While this requirement may seem straightforward, there are important nuances to consider. Germany’s approach to e-invoicing differs substantially from existing mandates in other EU member states, such as Romania and Italy, as well as from planned implementations in neighboring countries like France and Poland (scheduled for 2026). Several lesser-known aspects of the German e-invoicing mandate are often…