FIN 48 and state and local income taxes.

• Author: Kwiatek, Harlan J.

The required adoption of Financial Accounting Standards Board Interpretation No. 48, Accounting for Uncertainty in Income Taxes (FIN 48), for enterprises with fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2006, has placed increased scrutiny on state and local income taxes. Given that in the past, state and local income taxes often played second fiddle to their federal and international income tax siblings, many CPAs are facing a big challenge in trying to determine how FIN 48 affects financial disclosure of their clients' state and local income taxes. A number of questions, issues, concerns, and uncertainties make this analysis of state and local income taxes a difficult one.

For some CPAs, this may be their first encounter with some very technical and unusual terms and concepts, such as nexus, P.L. 86-272, solicitation, apportionment, allocation, intangible holding companies, and many others, that are at the heart of state and local income taxes. Instead of dealing with a single income tax code (as with U.S. federal income taxes), state and local income taxes are more akin to international taxes. Each state and local jurisdiction has its own income tax statutes, regulations, case law, and administrative practices, all of which seem to change on a regular basis. CPAs must consider these rapid changes when addressing state and local income tax positions.

Two-Step Analysis

A FIN 48 analysis of income taxes--including state and local income taxes--is a two-step process of recognition and measurement. At the outset, a determination must be made that a particular state and local income tax position has a "more-likely-than-not" chance of being sustained, in which case recognition would be required in the financial statement. In the second step, for each such tax position that meets the recognition threshold, a determination must be made of the amount of tax benefit that should be recorded in the financial statement. FIN 48 uses a cumulative probability approach, recognizing the largest amount of the tax benefit that is greater than 50% likely to be realized on ultimate settlement with a taxing authority having full knowledge of all relevant information.

Unit of Account

Key to the FIN 48 analysis of state and local income taxes is the identification of the "unit of account" which is the level at which a tax position should be analyzed. A state and local income tax position can have multiple elements or parts that are interrelated, with varying implications for the expected tax exposure or benefit. Therefore, the selection of a unit of account can affect the amount of tax exposure or benefit that may be recognized in the financial statements. While there are few concrete guidelines in this area, one practical consideration that should be weighed for state and local income tax purposes is the level of variation that may exist among the states in scrutinizing a particular tax position. If the state and local income tax position is one that many jurisdictions would scrutinize in a similar manner, it is possible that taking that tax position in multiple jurisdictions should be viewed as a single unit of account. This potentially could include tax positions as basic as certain common state modifications to federal taxable income, such as bonus depreciation decoupling or the state income tax addback, or as complex as transfer pricing between related entities. Alternatively, the determination of the proper unit of account may be much more complex for tax positions that tend to be...