Geoff Lane Posts

France has enacted a digital services tax in an effort to hamper the growth of innovative companies based in the United States. Under the plan, those companies with at least $851 million in global revenue – of which at least $28 million is generated in France –would be slapped with a 3% tax, retroactive to Jan. 1, 2019.

A discussion on AI was held before a packed room of Congressional staff and other stakeholders, and covered an array of topics such as AI’s enabling factors (data), who is using it (businesses and individual consumers), the hurdles to additional adoption (not enough data), and why we need it (to improve lives, workflows, and customer experiences, along with winning the global AI race).

The end of 2017 brought a slew of changes to our tax code. In December, Congress passed a package of reforms that overhauled much of the U.S. tax code for individuals and corporations. Many of these changes were enacted in January, leaving businesses wondering how the updated tax code will impact their operations.

The United States Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act this week, a package of tax reforms that will overhaul the U.S. tax code for individuals and corporations. Not since 1986 has our tax code undergone such a comprehensive renovation. Consider that in 1986, laptops weighed dozens of pounds, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were still a decade away from launching Google, Mark Zuckerberg was a toddler, and a young Democratic Senator from Tennessee named Al Gore introduced a bill to require the Office of Science and Technology to explore improvements to communications networks for supercomputers.

As tax reform deliberations begin in Washington D.C., CompTIA members had an opportunity earlier this month to sit down with key Congressional staff to discuss the issue. The hour-long roundtable gave members the chance to share their corporate tax priorities with staff, and learn more about forthcoming legislation that will reform our tax code.

Since its inception, the technology industry has ushered in radical changes. It’s the driving force behind the transformative products and services that are making our lives healthier, more convenient, more productive, and frankly, easier. These products and services garner headlines and generate a ton of money – the technology industry in the United States alone is worth about $1 trillion.

This week, key Republican policymakers in Washington unveiled a framework outlining their proposed tax reform goals. While the framework is light on details – this isn’t legislative text, after all – it does provide some insight into what the bill’s writers are thinking. For instance, on corporate reforms the framework would lower the tax rate on corporations to 20%, and tax passthroughs at 25%. It would allow businesses to “write off” or expense investment costs – so long as those investments aren’t structures – for at least five years.

Earlier this year, CompTIA published an eye-opening report on the skills gap. Titled “Assessing the IT Skills Gap,” CompTIA’s stellar research team surveyed 600 professionals to better understand the gap and its effects on the IT industry and the U.S. economy. Among the findings, CompTIA found that there is a widespread belief that the skills gap is growing, and that between now and 2024, approximately 800,000 IT workers will retire. Couple this with the more than 600,000 IT jobs that went unfilled in Q4 2016, and you see the problem – absent a big change, our economy might not have the human capital it needs to grow.

The House of Representatives this week, passed the Mobile Workforce State Income Tax Simplification Act (H.R. 1393) by a simple voice vote. Passage of the bill with such broad, bipartisan support should send a message to the Senate that it’s now time for that chamber to act accordingly and deliver its own bill (S. 540) for the president’s signature immediately. Many in the IT industry have been monitoring the proposal closely, as it reflects a changing economic landscape and would streamline some of our tax collection laws.

As the key driver of the Championing New Careers and Employees in Technology (“CHANCE in TECH”) Act, CompTIA recently convened a webinar to discuss this and other workforce issues important to the technology industry. Joining CompTIA’s Randi Parker and Geoff Lane, who serve as CompTIA’s policy experts on workforce issues, was Otto Katt, a key congressional staff member to Representative Phil Roe (R-TN).