[Ads-l] Taxes Are Hard=?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=94So_?=Is Pronouncing New Tax Law Acronyms Like FDII

Sat Apr 14 02:44:13 UTC 2018

Taxes Are Hard—So Is Pronouncing New Tax Law Acronyms Like FDIIThen there’s
also BEAT, QBI and GILTI
ILLUSTATION: WSJ; PHOTOS: ASSOCIATED PRESS, ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES
By
Richard Rubin and

Theo Francis
April 12, 2018 11:12 a.m. ET
5 COMMENTS
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WASHINGTON—Fiddy isn’t just a rapper’s name anymore. In 2018, it’s a tax
break.

Technically, it is a deduction in the new tax law
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tax-law-just-one-month-old-is-roaring-through-u-s-companies-1516899466>,
for Foreign-Derived Intangible Income,
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-explore-whether-u-s-can-replace-double-irish-1516789801>
 available to U.S. exporters. FDII, as it’s abbreviated, could cause a
trans-Atlantic spat over whether it violates international trade rules.

It’s already causing a squabble over something else—how to pronounce FDII.

The “F” comes from “foreign,” so some tax lawyers call it “FOE-dee,”
putting it alongside FOGEI and FORI, longstanding international tax
acronyms for Foreign Oil and Gas Extraction Income and Foreign Oil Related
Income.
[image: You pay it, but can you say it?]
You pay it, but can you say it?

Phooey to Foedee, says a younger crowd with a rare tax-meets-hip-hop
sensibility and a familiarity with the rapper 50 Cent, also known as Fiddy
and famous for his album “Get Rich or Die Tryin’.”

“In the absence of published guidance from the government, I’m going with
Fiddy,” says Shamik Trivedi, a 35-year-old senior manager at the Grant
Thornton LLP accounting firm in Washington.

University of Michigan law and economics professor James R. Hines Jr. , 59
years old, puts himself staunchly in the Foedee camp. “Millennials,” he
says. “What are you going to do?”

Others eschew both acronym pronunciations, says Catherine Schultz, vice
president for tax policy at the National Foreign Trade Council: “Some
people are saying, ‘I’m just going to say eff dee eye eye, because the
other two sound silly.’ ”

The Fiddy-Foedee ferment is part of a broader struggle among tax
professionals to come up with common names and terms for new provisions in
last year’s tax overhaul.
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-thing-tax-overhaul-wont-do-simplify-corporate-taxes-1514030401>

The name of the tax law itself has tax experts doing linguistic gymnastics
because it’s a mouthful, thanks to a last-minute squabble as Congress
rushed to complete the legislation.

Democrats raised a procedural challenge and Republicans couldn’t muster the
60 votes needed to call it the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, as they wanted.
President Donald Trump’s choice, the Cut Cut Cut Act, was never really on
the table.
[image: President Donald Trump at the White House in December after
Congress passed the tax act.]
President Donald Trump at the White House in December after Congress passed
the tax act. PHOTO: ALEX EDELMAN/ZUMA PRESS

The formal title is “An Act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to
titles II and V of the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year
2018.”

Companies laying out the law’s impact for investors have struggled to agree
on what to call it. Some simply use “The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” but
securities lawyers can be sticklers for precision. In a March 8 securities
filing, Dr Pepper Snapple Group <http://quotes.wsj.com/DPS> Inc. resorted
to “the recently enacted U.S. tax reform legislation commonly referred to
as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.”

European consumer-products giant Unilever <http://quotes.wsj.com/UL> PLC
joined others in preferring “HR1, formerly known as The Tax Cuts and Jobs
Act.”

The tax world already ran on arcane jargon, a gumbo of abbreviations and
numbered Internal Revenue Code sections that let tax experts share a common
tongue. The new tax act scrambled much of that argot, and veteran lawyers
say they sometimes feel as if they are back in law school, deciphering a
new code even as they learn new rules and devise new strategies.
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“You have to rethink everything you’ve ever done on tax planning before.
You can throw it out and start all over again,” says the foreign-trade
council’s Ms. Schultz. “It seems to be never-ending right now.”

Journalists and commentators have struggled to find clear, succinct and
still accurate ways to refer to what is formally known as the “treatment of
deferred foreign income upon transition to participation exemption system.”

Some call it a toll charge. Others call it a mandatory one-time tax on
stockpiled foreign profits
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-to-pay-38-billion-in-repatriation-tax-plans-new-u-s-campus-1516215419>.
Tax lawyers just call it “965,” after the legislative section spelling out
the provision.

None of this is helped by the dubious wit of congressional drafters. A
provision intended to make it harder for companies to shift profits offshore
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-tax-law-haunts-companies-that-did-inversion-deals-1518350401>
 was dubbed the Base Erosion and Anti-Abuse Tax, or BEAT
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/beat-up-u-s-tax-provision-may-sting-foreign-firms-1518526800>.
The minimum tax on U.S. companies’ foreign income is officially called
the Global
Intangible Low-Taxed Income provision, or GILTI.
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-tax-on-overseas-earnings-hits-unintended-targets-1522056600>

Both terms first appeared in the Senate tax plan in November. Headline
writers at industry publication Tax Notes took notice, offering up “More
GILTI Than You Thought,” “Get with the BEAT,” “A Response to an Off-BEAT
Analysis” and “Can Marked-Up Services Skip the BEAT?” among others.

“The Senate triumphed with better acronyms,” says Steven Rosenthal, senior
fellow at the Tax Policy Center. “Those staffers deserve something for
that.”

Make that the “guilty” tax, if you’re trying to read about what corporate
executives are saying about it. The term appears to have been mistyped in
more than a dozen corporate conference calls transcribed for Standard &
Poor’s since the end of 2017.

“However, the negative effects, mostly the so-called guilty tax of the tax
reform, will not impact us until fiscal year ’19,” Didier Hirsch, chief
financial officer of biomedical instrument maker Agilent Technologies Inc.,
told investors on a Feb. 14 conference call, according to a transcript.

In other areas, the law’s drafters managed to avoid cuteness. That has left
tax experts referring to the new deduction for partnerships and other
pass-through businesses by its code section, 199A, or as QBI, for the
Qualified Business Income deduction that section creates.

They reserve the term “Cue-Bye” not for QBI but for QBAI, the Qualified
Business Asset Investment, which has absolutely nothing to do with QBI.

All the new terminology has left Jeffery Yablon, a Washington lawyer who
specializes in tax-exempt groups, happy with his earlier decision to leave
the profession at the end of 2017.

“I had announced I was going to retire way before this tax law was going to
pass, but I’m delighted with my timing,” says Mr. Yablon, the author of “As
Certain As Death: Quotations About Taxes,” which runs 338 pages. “I don’t
have to spend a lot of nonbillable time learning about stuff.”

*Write to *Richard Rubin at richard.rubin at wsj.com and Theo Francis at
theo.francis at wsj.com

Appeared in the April 13, 2018, print edition as 'You Say ‘Fiddy,’ I Say
‘Foedee’.'

*https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-say-fiddy-i-say-foedeeno-one-knows-what-to-call-new-tax-provisions-1523545935
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-say-fiddy-i-say-foedeeno-one-knows-what-to-call-new-tax-provisions-1523545935>*

DanG

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