The IRS collects federal taxes, states collect their own sets of taxes, and even local governments (such as counties or cities) collect taxes. Taxes can be called different things in different parts of the country, and sometimes even have different names for the same type of taxes.
Both state and local government agencies are involved in property taxes, but their roles with assessment, collection and compliance can differ. In a few states, a single state agency is primarily responsible for overall appraisal, assessment, and collection. Almost all states (except for six) have income taxes, collected from a state agency; property taxes, however, are usually collected locally through an office in the county government (though California requires state collection).
For the most part, the responsibilities for the various phases of property tax (levy, appraisal, collection) rests almost entirely upon the taxing units of local government. A "taxing unit," such as a county, city, town, hospital, garbage, education, or special district, is a legal part of the government with elected or appointed officers, who serve a distinct geographic area.
Because major corporations can also bring jobs, along with costs for new services or roads and lights, governments often negotiate how much they will charge for a company to move into a community. Obviously, the results of such negotiations can play a big part in where a business decides to operate. If exceptions to the tax rules prove necessary, new and special rules are passed by local or state governments, allowing the elected officials to make these taxing decisions.
Voters are often asked to approve special "levies," which are types of taxes, to be collected from the local tax assessor’s office. The purpose of levies can range from school operations to library bonds. There are also specific sets of rules for certain types of businesses. For example, state agencies' tax rates typically determine some or even all of the operating properties of railroads and utilities.
Sometimes, local tax entities may use other names for taxes, such as "fees," "assessments," or "licenses." Entertainers who are nationally known, such as pro athletes, can sometimes receive special treatment in some of the states where they play, such that on days they are “working” in another state, they pay much higher tax rates than normally. In cities such as New York City and Los Angeles, virtually whole tax divisions are dedicated to tracking the work (and worth) of these out-of-state taxpayers.
Notre Dame in London hosted “The Google Book Project: Antitrust and Intellectual Property Perspectives.” | News | The Law School | University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame in London hosted “The Google Book Project: Antitrust and Intellectual Property Perspectives.” The antitrust and intellectual property issues raised by the Google Book Project and the judicial challenges resulting therefrom were discussed on March 4 by a panel consisting of Doctor Ioannis Lianos of University College London and Professor Jonathan Griffiths of Queen Mary University of London, with Professor Joseph Bauer of Notre Dame Law School serving as moderator.
More than four years after the federal government introduced an offshore tax evasion tip line to fight offshore tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance, Quebec’s tax authority is following suit by launching a whistleblower program that will offer monetary rewards.
The new whistleblower program will pay whistleblowers rewards of up to 15 per cent of anything above $100,000 the Quebec taxman recovers in a tax fraud investigation. The exact percentage of the whistleblower’s reward will depend on the “quality and usefulness” of the information, according to a Revenue Quebec interpretation bulletin. The informant’s “level of cooperation” too will play a role but the provincial taxman does not stipulate, not even in its bulletin, what that entails. Neither does the Quebec tax authority explain what it means that it is offering a reward to “offset the potential personal, social and professional consequences of reporting another taxpayer.”
The program, which complements Canada Revenue Agency’s Offshore Tax Informant Program (OTIP), only deals with information involving anti-avoidance or shams. Anonymous whistleblowers will not be rewarded by the program. Instead, informants must identify themselves and if the information is deemed to be pertinent, the whistleblower must sign a contract to “define the parties’ respective commitments,” according to Revenue Quebec documentation. The reward will be paid only once amounts have been recovered and all deadlines for objection or appeal by the taxpayers have elapsed. The reward will be taxed.
Confidentiality, always a sticky point, is not promised. While the Quebec taxman says it will protect the informant’s identity, it does leave open the door for confidentiality to be breached. Revenue Quebec says there is a possibility that informants may be called to testify as a witness in legal proceedings. In such cases, the tax authority will notify the informant before deciding whether to continue the proceedings
Revenue Quebec already has an existing whistleblower program that allows taxpayers to report, even anonymously, a person or business they suspect is not meeting its tax obligations. But it does not offer financial incentives.
The new whistleblower program was launched as part of the “Tax Fairness Action Plan” tabled by Quebec’s minister of Finance, Carlos Leitao on November 2017. The action plan contains 14 actions that address tax havens, aggressive tax planning, transfer pricing and e-commerce with suppliers having no significant presence in Quebec.
“Offering a reward, in a well-structure framework, could be an efficient enticement to encourage people who have pertinent information to transmit it to Revenue Quebec,” said Leitao in a statement. “This information will allow it to act more efficiently to detect more rapidly tax avoidance strategies.”
Revenue Quebec’s expectations may have to be dampened. While the U.S. taxman’s whistleblowing program has led to recovery of “significant” unreported tax dollars and successful tax prosecutions, the CRA’s program has “to date had limited success,” points out David Chodikoff, a Toronto civil and criminal tax litigator with Miller Thomson LLP in an article published last year in the Canadian Tax Journal. But Chodikoff hastens to add that though it may too early in the program’s existence to pass judgment on its efficacy, the program faces unique challenges that Americans do not. Namely, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
“Once the predominant purpose of an inquiry by the CRA is the determination of penal liability, the taxpayer’s rights as secured by the Charter are fully engaged” thanks to sections 7 through 11 of the Charter, notes Chodikoff. And Charter challenges, he adds, are common in criminal tax matters.
The landmark ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Jordan case further complicates matters due to the introduction of a numerical ceiling. “It is hard to imagine that the Jordan decision would not have an impact on the potential conduct of a tax prosecution in Canada,” said Chodikoff, Miller Thomson’s national leader in tax litigation.
Creating a ritual around your intention is incredibly powerful. Each time Mike and I want to manifest something (like a financial goal) we sit on the floor together with our citrine crystals. We light a candle, hold hands, and pray out loud together. We speak our desires in the present tense and surround them in Divine Love. It doesn’t matter so much what the ritual is (but usually mine involve a candle and a crystal). It matters that you mark your intention with a conscious action that acknowledges the Divine.
Adobe Acrobat Professional is powerful software, which can help lawyers do more with PDF files in e-filing, e-discovery, and general everyday law practice. But Acrobat Professional, which costs over $400, is way too expensive for lawyers in most small firms.
Adobe is showing no signs of lowering the price of Acrobat, and in fact seems headed in the direction of selling its software only on a subscription basis. Currently, Acrobat goes for $19/month as a subscription. If Adobe starts requiring lawyers to pay $200/year for its flagship PDF software, even fewer lawyers will opt to use it.
Enter Nuance Power PDF Advanced software (currently only available for Windows computers), which retails for $149. At one-third the price of Acrobat, many lawyers should be paying close attention to Power PDF.
The questions are: what trade-offs are there? And, does it have all of the features of the $400 Acrobat Professional?
When Ernie calls himself a power user just below, he’s not kidding. He literally wrote the book (and the blog) on Acrobat and PDF for lawyers. That’s why I asked him to write this review. —Ed.
Not surprisingly, as a power user of Acrobat I found some trade-offs. But I also found that Nuance Power PDF Advanced does everything Acrobat Professional does, but with a much easier-to-understand interface. In short, it’s a great option that many lawyers will happily embrace.
Simple export from PDF to a Microsoft Office document such as Word (or to Wordperfect format, which is not even an option in Acrobat).
In short, Nuance took the “kitchen-sink” approach to adding features. But, they did so in a way that’s not hard to figure out.
Frankly, I find the interface of Power PDF (which is obviously much less familiar to me), easier to figure out than Acrobat. If you’re already used to the toolbar Ribbon in Microsoft Office, then Nuance’s Power PDF will be even easier to figure out.
Nuance has done a great job on the look and feel of its new PDF software. Tools are all clearly labeled and easy to find. Acrobat’s user interface, on the other hand, has been going backwards. The last two editions of Acrobat (X and XI) confused many of us with menus and tools that were moved or renamed. Adobe also increased the number of clicks needed to access many tools in Acrobat.
Acrobat has two side panels, one on the right and one on the left. Why they did this makes no sense to me. Nuance has only one side panel on the left, and it’s easy to figure out what tools are located there.
The comments and attachments area is located on the bottom, which is easy to find and makes a lot of sense.
Acrobat ships with some default stamps that are typically used in business settings. The design quality of Adobe’s stamps is pretty pedestrian.
Nuance has about the same number of stamp choices, and its stamps look more modern and aesthetically pleasing.
The most-useful kind of stamp, in my estimation, is a signature stamp. Creating a full-blown digital signature is too cumbersome, and usually results in the recipient of the digitally-signed PDF being confused.
A signature stamp is just an imported digital copy of your real signature. The process for importing a graphic signature is the same in Nuance and Acrobat software, but Nuance offers some additional useful options.
First, when you import your graphic signature in Nuance’s Power PDF you can easily erase the white background during the import process. With Acrobat the process is harder and less intuitive.
Also, Nuance has a built-in, easy-to-find flattening option so you can permanently embed the signature into the document. Acrobat XI added a new menu that connects to its online EchoSign digital signature service, and from there you can flatten a signature. But it’s not obvious unless you know that the flattening option is there.
Adobe is eager to connect Acrobat to its EchoSign service, which is cloud-based. And as I mentioned, it’s possible that soon Acrobat will only be available as a subscription model.
Power PDF allows you to integrate easily with file-sharing sites like Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, and Office 365. Firms can also integrate the software with document management systems such as NetDocuments or Sharepoint, among others.
Nuance’s software also allows you to add “sticky notes” to a PDF file using a cloud-based version of its well-known Dragon speech recognition software.
The main reason I have advised lawyers to get at least one copy of Acrobat Professional for their law office is for the bates-stamping and redaction features. Acrobat Standard ($300) does not have these two important features.
Nuance Power PDF Advanced has them, and they work in the same manner as Adobe Acrobat Professional. Nuance sells a less expensive version of Power PDF called “Standard,” that does not do bates-stamping and redaction, and costs just $89.
Bates stamping in Nuance offers the ability to shrink the document to create white space where the bates-number can reliably be placed. And it allows you to save your favorite settings for reuse later.
Finding the bates-stamping function in Nuance was a rare example of something not being where I’d expect it. It’s located under the Edit menu, as opposed to the Advanced Processing menu. But it’s not easy to find in Acrobat either.
Remember the beginning of this article, when I mentioned trade-offs? Well, keyboard shortcuts are one area where Nuance is behind Acrobat.
All of the keyboard shortcuts in Acrobat work in Nuance except two: jumping to specific pages, and creating sticky notes. Not having a keyboard shortcut to jump to a specific page baffles me.
The document splitting function in Acrobat is incredibly useful, and offers 3 choices: split by file size, split by number of pages, and split by bookmark.
Nuance Power PDF offers eight options, including the ability split by bookmarks below top-level (Acrobat only allows you to split by top-level bookmarks).
But Acrobat offers the ability to have the resulting files created from top-level bookmarks named the same as the bookmark. Nuance Power PDF outputs bookmarks with file names that begin with the phrase “Segment” followed by a number assigned to the bookmark, and then the file name of the source PDF.
Trust me, you want the ability to split bookmarks and wind up with file names based on the bookmarks. The reason is simple, if not obvious. When you get a large PDF from a client that contains many individual documents, you’ll want to wind up with a separate PDF for each document.
Each separate document is a separate PDF, which makes it easy to keep track of documents. But you want the documents to be named so that they sort chronologically, and do so automatically. In other words, you want the document to be named something like 2014–04–04 Letter from B. Jones to L. Smith re copyright.
So bookmarking and splitting is a key part of the workflow that produces this PDF document-management nirvana. Unfortunately, with Nuance you can’t split PDFs in this way, and that’s more than just sad or annoying. It’s a major downfall.
Nuance Power PDF Advanced is easy to figure out and use. And the price is obviously the main advantage over Acrobat, since it costs about $300 less. Not having those two keyboard shortcuts I mentioned isn’t a big enough trade-off to make me jump ship from Acrobat.
However, not having the ability to split PDF bookmarks to create documents named based on the bookmark name is the real deal-killer for me. But here’s a happier takeaway.
For years I’ve told lawyers that they need at least one copy of Acrobat Professional in their office, and then they can get every one else a copy of Acrobat Standard. Now I’ll probably tell them to get Nuance Power PDF Advanced for all the lawyers who don’t have Acrobat Professional: it’s half the cost of Acrobat Standard, and much more useful.
Nuance Power PDF Advanced is half the cost of Acrobat Standard, and much more useful. It doesn’t quite measure up to Acrobat Professional, though.
Ernie Svenson first leveraged technology as a commercial litigator at a mid-sized law firm, and later as a solo lawyer. He created the PDFforLawyers blog, and recently wrote a PDF guidebook titled Acrobat in One Hour for Lawyers.
I had the worst experience with Nuance where the license would keep going invalid. Nuance couldn’t figure it out and kept resetting it. I finally gave up.
Adobe software is so expensive. Dreamweaver is the most expensive HTML editors and Acrobat (Full) is the most expensive PDF software. There many cheaper or free alternatives that can do the same job
Does Nuance let me install on multiple computers with one license? If so, how many? Acrobat XI lets me install on two computers with one license. If Nuance allows only one, the price savings over Acrobat XI is not as great.
I’m just starting on testing Power PDF 2 versus Acrobat DC Pro for our law firm. This was a good article and I found several of the same pros in my usage. However, the main drawback mentioned in this article does work in at least version 2. To split a document by bookmark with the names use the “Extract by bookmark level” instead of split. I think this is a poorly worded option and if it wasn’t for the help file describing it as exactly what I wanted (plus some with the html index) – I would have missed it.
Quick tip I found working with Nuance when it comes to splitting a pdf by bookmark level and keeping the bookmark name as the newly generated pdf name. As you pointed out Adobe allows you to split a pdf and the still reatin the bookmark names as the names of the split pdfs. It was a little disappointing to read that Nuance didn’t offer this feature. However after doing a little poking around I found out that if you choose extract by bookmark level and then enter the number 1 in the box to the right, your newly split pdfs will now retain the bookmark names as the pdf names and not the ” “Segment” followed by a number assigned to the bookmark”. I have only used the feature for top level bookmarks so I am not sure if it would work with sub-bookmarks. Hope this helps anyone searching for a way to accomplish splitting a pdf by bookmarks and keeping the bookmark description as the new pdf name.
FindLaw Canada’s lawyer directory for Corner Brook, Newfoundland and Labrador will help you find the best lawyer for your needs. Browse an extensive range of listings covering everything from personal injury to estate planning to property law.
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Attorney David Comerford has been practicing law and serving clients in Johnston, Rhode Island for many years. If you are in need of assistance with a Criminal Defense related...	
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