The California Franchise Tax Board has scheduled an Interested Parties Meeting to discuss proposed changes to its apportionment regulations. Several years ago, when the statute called for sourcing receipts from services and intangibles at the location of income producing activity, based on cost of performance, the FTB, after a series on interested parties meetings, adopted new regulation 25137-14 sourcing receipts for mutual fund service providers and asset management service providers not at the location of the service provider, but at location of customers.  That was good news for California service providers and bad news for out-of-state service providers.

The FTB scheduled on December 22, 2016 an Interested Parties Meeting for January 20, 2017 to discuss a series of issues arising under the new market- based sourcing regulations. A Discussion Topic Paper (attached) was issued on January 3, 2017, and included (1) draft examples of souring income from asset management fees, (2) a discussion of “reasonable approximation”, including who makes that reasonable approximation, (3) clarification of the term “benefit of a service” in several contexts, including timing, government contracts, R&D contracts and patent sales, (4) dividend assignment, (5) a freight forwarding example, (5) interest received from a business entity borrower and (6) marketing intangibles.

The FTB takes these Interested Parties Meetings seriously.  Taxpayers should pay immediate attention to whether any of these issues are of significance to them, and consider participating.