Internal Revenue Service May 24, 2005 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

An open meeting of the Wage & Investment Reducing Taxpayer Burden (Notices) Issue Committee of the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel (via teleconference) has been cancelled. The Taxpayer Advocacy Panel is soliciting public comments, ideas and suggestions on improving customer service at the Internal Revenue Service.

This document contains temporary regulations relating to the computation and allocation of the credit for increasing research activities for members of a controlled group of corporations or a group of trades or businesses under common control. These temporary regulations reflect changes made to section 41 by the Revenue Reconciliation Act of 1989 (1989 Act), which introduced the current computational regime for the credit, and the Small Business Job Protection Act of 1996, which introduced the alternative incremental research credit. The text of the temporary regulations also serves as the text of the proposed regulations set forth in the notice of proposed rulemaking on this subject in the Proposed Rules section in this issue of the Federal Register.

This document sets forth an elective safe harbor for dealers in securities, dealers in commodities, and traders in securities and commodities that permits these taxpayers to make an election pursuant to which the values of positions reported on certain financial statements are the fair market values of those positions for purposes of section 475 of the Internal Revenue Code. This safe harbor attempts to reduce the compliance burden upon taxpayers and to improve the administrability of the valuation aspect of section 475 for the Internal Revenue Service. This document also provides a notice of a public hearing on these proposed regulations.

This document withdraws the remaining portion of the notice of proposed rulemaking published in the Federal Register on June 3, 1971 (36 FR 10787) and contains proposed regulations relating to the tax treatment of certain transfers of partnership equity in connection with the performance of services. The proposed regulations provide that the transfer of a partnership interest in connection with the performance of services is subject to section 83 of the Internal Revenue Code (Code) and provide rules for coordinating section 83 with partnership taxation principles. The proposed regulations also provide that no gain or loss is recognized by a partnership on the transfer or vesting of an interest in the transferring partnership in connection with the performance of services for the transferring partnership. This document also provides a notice of public hearing on these proposed regulations.