Does your employer collect your state income tax and keep it for themselves?

More than 2,700 companies collect your state income tax, and then keep it for themselves under deals they have struck with the states. GE, Goldman Sachs, P&G, Chrysler, Ford, GM Nissan, Toyota, and many others all benefit. The practice is more pervasive than thought.

Reuters has a good summary article.

Taxed by the boss

Across the United States more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers – and are keeping the money with the states’ approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday.

The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations, identifies 16 states that let companies divert some or all of the state income taxes deducted from workers’ paychecks. None of the states requires notifying the workers, whose withholdings are treated as taxes they paid.

General Electric, Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, Chrysler, Ford, General Motors and AMC Theatres enjoy deals to keep state taxes deducted from their workers’ paychecks, the report shows. Foreign companies also enjoy such arrangements, including Electrolux, Nissan, Toyota and a host of Canadian, Japanese and European banks, Good Jobs First says.

Why do state governments do this? Public records show that large companies often pay little or no state income tax in states where they have large operations, as this column has documented. Some companies get discounts on property, sales and other taxes. So how to provide even more subsidies without writing a check? Simple. Let corporations keep the state income taxes deducted from their workers’ paychecks for up to 25 years.

(more at url above)

Europe Concordia

Europe on the Brink: Bank Failures

Is this the time to start a betting pool on which large European bank fails first or pray for some short-term fix that will delay the inescapable failures?

The horrible truth dawned on Europe’s leaders late last year; the Euro has no future except for the disassembly of the system. Any recent meetings will only stave off the inevitable.

The next leg appears to be failure of multiple banks in Europe. Collectively these institutions need to immediately find €114.7bn of extra capital in order to weather the storm. The banks can no longer depend on the Euro zone governments as a backstop; the major governments are even unable to combine to offer a common bond auction. Individually the recent government bond auctions have been severely under-subscribed; no one wants to purchase European government debt at any type of reasonable price – only at yields effectively implying the entire EU is in default.

Will one of France’s large banks be the first to fail; BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole and Societe Generale. All were downgraded by Moody’s on Friday. Germany’s Commerzbank appears to be teetering on the brink. Do the government coffers in France and Germany still contain enough funding to bail-out these entities with a significant cash infusion, or is the entire Eurozone banking system on the edge of collapse as the banks run out of assets to pledge to keep vital funding lines open.

It appears that the U.K was very wise when they rejected any further involvement with this debacle.

Bond Spreads suggest BoA is going out of business

It is interesting to note the greatly increasing credit default swaps for Bank of America over the past few weeks. When viewed in a traditional context, the acceleration of the increased spreads suggest that BoA will be out of business somewhere in 2012.

The increased spreads for BoA is noted in a recent WSJ article. The article does not take the next step to compare the spread increase to those of other financial institutions that have required re-organization or cash infusion to remain solvent.

"Bank of America credit default swaps have spiked to 4.60 percentage points this morning, up from 4.40 percentage points Monday. The annual cost of protecting a notional $10 million of the bank's senior bonds against default for five years is now $460,000, suggesting banks are under more pressure than ever and banking events overseas are just one negative force weighing down the sector."

The stock price below $6 is not a good sign either, but not as pertinent as the debt spread situation.

The Truth About Multi-Tasking

I always wonder about the value of a meeting when everyone is looking at their laptop or smart phone while ignoring the presenter. Dilbert captures the reality....

Bill introduced to reinstate Glass-Steagull

One of the key points that the recent financial crisis has demonstrated is that there is an need to separate investment and commercial banking. Investment banking is built on risk while commercial banking is built on safety. Allowing the combination of the two starting in the 1980's is the real root cause of our current financial crisis - enabling greedy risk prone practices to run amok in the traditionally prudent mortgage industry.

Glass-Steagull originally separated commercial and investment banking in 1933 after it became obvious that the catastrophic bank failures during the Great Depression were due to the jeopardy created by conflicting purposes.

Finally someone in Congress has come to their senses and introduced a bill to re-introduce the intent of Glass-Steagull. Help support HR.1489