One year ago this week, I started learning Italian. It’s far from an immersion course—I spend a few minutes each day taking lessons from an array of cartoon characters on the Duolingo app. It’s vastly different from the way I learned French and Spanish, which was in a classroom every day with a teacher, taking tests, and getting graded.
I wanted to learn Italian after meeting my significant other’s family in Rome. Sitting at a table with his mother and sister and not understanding a single word being spoken was humbling. They couldn’t have been nicer and, thankfully, they knew a few basic phrases in English. But the experience sparked a drive to connect with two people who were now in my life, even if they were thousands of miles away most of the time.
Progress has been, well, slow—after a year, I can put together some simple sentences and point to things around the kitchen and say their names in italiano. But if I stay with it, I might learn enough to ask my significant other to parla con me.
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A view of Rome and the Vatican is seen from the Quirinale Palace.
Photographer: Ludovic Marin/ AFP via Getty Images
Quick Trivia
(Quiz Veloce)
The longest Italian word contains 26 letters. What is it?
Answer at the bottom.
State Insights
(Approfondimenti Stato)
Liberty Media Corp.’s spinoff of the Atlanta Braves shows tax practitioners the importance of heeding what is seemingly the simplest of the Section 355 requirements—the active business requirement, says tax and consulting firm president Robert Willens.
UConn Law Professor Richard D. Pomp delves into the details of the recent North Carolina Supreme Court decision in Quad Graphics Inc. v N.C. Dep’t of Revenue.
Federal Insights
(Approfondimenti Federali)
New guidance addressing the corporate alternative minimum tax suggests that Treasury will build out an extensive and complicated CAMT regime. Whether taxpayers and the IRS will be able to handle this complexity is an open question, says Monisha Santamaria of KPMG in Washington, D.C.
Debevoise & Plimpton attorneys Winston Paes and Stephen Petraeus analyze why the US Supreme Court dismissed a case that involved grand jury subpoenas for records related to a law firm’s work for a client on tax and cryptocurrency issues. They also offer implications for the legal and business communities.
Global Insights
(Approfondimenti Globali)
The OECD’s consultation document known as Amount B aims to simplify some transfer pricing rules, particularly for in-country baseline marketing and distribution activities. If revenue authorities could share more commonalities or be more flexible, it could help streamline the application of transactional net margin method benchmarking, say Deloitte Hong Kong’s Victor Zhang and Season Guo.
Recent EU actions such as the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive may soon expose US and other non-EU multinational corporations to a novel type of tax reporting. Businesses will need to set up new processes and procedures to meet these challenges, say Will Morris, Andy Wiggins, and Matt Timmons of PwC.
As online learning remains popular even with the easing of the pandemic, Dam Bao Ngoc and Lac Boi Tho of Grant Thornton look at the legal, regulatory, and tax-related requirements for overseas educational businesses providing such services in Vietnam.
Last year was quiet for new standards and amendments from the International Accounting Standards Board. But financial statement preparers should start getting ready for some changes that took effect this month, says Stout’s Mhalou Abadiano.
Richard McBride of Certino explains the increased tax challenges facing businesses with a global workforce and how technology can be used to address these.
Commentary
(Commento)
In a two-part article, Oliver R. Hoor and Samantha Schmitz of ATOZ Tax Advisers argue that the European Commission’s initiative for a new framework for corporate taxation doesn’t make sense, particularly considering the transformation of the international and European tax landscape following the OECD base erosion and profit shifting project.
A Closer Look
(Uno Sguardo Ravvicinato)
With little to no official guidance on applying sales tax to metaverse transactions, tax professionals need to perform case-by-case analyses—especially because many tax administrations and legislators don’t know what the metaverse is or how it operates, says…
Read More: Making Connections by Using ‘La Loro Lingua’