Bill Backstrom, head of the Tax Practice Group and Matt Mantle, a partner on the state & local tax team in the New Orleans office, both presented at the Paul J. Hartman State & Local Tax Forum in Nashville, Tennessee. Bill presented on the panel session “New-Age Mergers & Acquisitions Post-Wayfair and Federal Tax Reform.” This panel discussed the broadening lens of successor liability and risks brought about by Wayfair and Tax Reform when performing due diligence reviews. The panel also shared insights on how Wayfair and Tax Reform have impacted post acquisition structuring.

Matt’s panel, “The Ever-Expanding Sales & Use Tax Base,” provided an overview of multistate sales taxation of services, legislative and administrative efforts to tax services, and other strategies that states and localities are taking to further expand the sales tax base, including the creative “shrinking” of exemptions and shoehorning of services into older, unrelated sales tax laws. Matt’s presentation was also noted in the Bloomberg Law Daily Tax Report article “States Unlikely to Broaden Their Sales Tax Bases in 2020,” and quotes Matt, “The idea has proved politically unpopular in most jurisdictions and state lawmakers have failed to figure out how to sell tax-broadening measures to the public.”