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Florida residents and business owners affected by Hurricane Ian will have extra time to file their tax returns. The IRS said returns due in mid-October, including individual tax returns for 2021 where taxpayers received the automatic six-month extension, are now due February 15th 2023. Throughout Florida, the IRS also delayed quarterly estimated tax payments due in January along with payroll- and excise-tax returns due in October and January. All will now be due February 15th.

 

Wall Street Journal

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem made a campaign promise Wednesday to repeal the state's tax on groceries, changing course to lend outspoken support to a bipartisan proposal she did not publicly endorse in March. The Republican governor made the announcement two days ahead of a debate today with her Democratic challenger Jamie Smith, a state lawmaker who pushed the repeal of the 4.5% tax on groceries for years and helped broker a bipartisan vote to pass it in the House this year. Ms. Noem billed the campaign promise Wednesday as “the largest tax cut in South Dakota's history,” saying it would push $100m “directly to families to help them with their budget.”

 

US News and World Report

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Deloitte has announced a $1.5bn investment in social impact projects, to help create and foster equity in education and workforce development, financial inclusion, and health. The 10-year commitment will see Deloitte support community-driven change by strengthening local efforts, bringing together key decisionmakers, and facilitating collaboration to help drive collective action across the private and public sectors. The combined knowledge and experience of Deloitte and local leaders within each organization will serve as a catalyst for innovation and approaches that can contribute to change at scale. "Our three focus areas are inextricably linked to each other and to the opportunity for people to have prosperous lives in our society," said Kwasi Mitchell, chief purpose officer at Deloitte. "Deeply-rooted inequities are larger than any single entity can take on alone. The broader ecosystem, and those proximate to the issues and their communities, can be powerful instruments for sustained change."

 

PR Newswire

Battered by surging consumer prices and rising interest rates, the U.S. economy shrank at a 0.6% annual rate from April through June, the Commerce Department announced Thursday, unchanged from its previous estimate. It marked the second consecutive quarter of economic contraction, meeting the technical definition of a recession. However, another data point known as gross domestic income, which is an alternative measure of economic growth, actually increased by 0.1% in the second quarter. The Commerce Department also released revised numbers for past years’ GDP. The update showed that the economy performed slightly better in 2020 and 2021 than previously reported. GDP rose 5.9% last year, up from the previously reported 5.7%, and, pounded by the coronavirus pandemic, it shrank 2.8% in 2020, not as bad as the 3.4% previously on record. GDP remained unchanged for 2018 (2.9%) and 2019 (2.3%). Growth for 2017 was downgraded slightly - to 2.2% from 2.3%.

 

ABC News

Fox News

New York Times

US News and World Report

Applications for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level since the spring as many employers hesitate to lay off workers despite a slowing economy. The Labor Department said that initial jobless claims decreased to a seasonally-adjusted 193,000, from a revised 209,000 the previous week, the lowest since late April and below both the 215,000 expected by analysts polled by Refinitiv, and the prepandemic average of 218,000 in 2019. The four-week moving average fell by 8,750 to 207,000, while continuing claims decreased to 1.35m in the seven weeks to September 17th, from 1.38m a week earlier. The strong labor numbers come amid Fed efforts to cool the economy and bring down inflation, which is running near its highest levels since the early 1980s. “The recent decline in layoffs flies in the face of the Fed’s efforts to soften up labor market conditions and knock inflation back down toward its 2% target,” said Jim Baird, chief investment officer at Plante Moran. “The capital markets have heard the Fed, and investors are feeling the pain. But the jobs market? For now at least, it’s not listening."

 

CNN

CNBC

US News and World Report

Wall Street Journal

U.S. District Judge Gregory Woods in Manhattan has dismissed two antitrust lawsuits accusing Amazon and five large publishers - Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster - of illegally conspiring to fix U.S. prices of electronic and traditional books, causing consumers and bookstores to pay more. Consumers accused the defendants of signing agreements that let the publishers inflate e-book prices by locking in a 30% "agency" fee for Amazon on each sale, and guaranteeing that Amazon's prices would not be undercut. Retail booksellers, meanwhile, alleged that Amazon had been awarded a "discriminatory discount" on hardbacks, paperbacks and mass-produced books, forcing them to pay higher wholesale prices to the publishers and depressing book sales. However, Woods agreed with U.S. Magistrate Judge Valerie Figueredo's recommendation last month that both lawsuits be dismissed, citing a lack of evidence of collusion.

 

Reuters

Ignition, a client engagement and commerce platform for professional services firms, has unveiled Ignition Smart Billing, an integrated feature with leading payroll platform Gusto to automate billing for services priced per employee for accounting firms. Ignition’s Smart Billing integration automatically calculates the client’s variable Gusto subscription fee, so accounting firms no longer have to worry about managing variable costs or changes in headcount manually. Whether clients have seasonal employees or employees frequently joining or leaving the business, Ignition syncs with Gusto in real-time to automatically fetch the current employee count, whenever an invoice is issued. 

 

CPA Practice Advisor

OECD secretary-general Mathias Cormann has said there is “momentum building” for a global minimum tax rate. Mr Cormann, a former Australian Minister for Finance, nevertheless told an OECD Forum on Tax Administration in Sydney that “the world has entered a highly challenging and disruptive period” and “Pressures from economic fragmentation around the world are real and growing.” He said: “In the near term, we face lower growth and high inflation, with negative impacts on business investment and private consumption. The challenges facing our international rules-based order are profound . . . Digitalisation is changing how businesses operate, domestically and across borders.” Mr Cormann, in closing remarks, said once a "critical mass" of countries legislated the global minimum it would very quickly become "self-perpetuating . . . as it will not be in any country's interest to leave money on the table for other jurisdictions to collect at their expense. That is why we are quietly optimistic that the momentum is there to ensure that pillar two of this historic agreement will be implemented in time for 2024."

 

West Australian

The Australian

The SEC has fined the Chinese affiliate of Deloitte $20m, having found that the firm let some clients, including foreign companies listed on U.S. exchanges, conduct their own audit work. Deloitte's Chinese affiliate asked some clients to select their own samples for testing and to prepare documentation, giving the appearance that Deloitte-China had tested their financial statements and internal controls. SEC Chair Gary Gensler said: “We find that Deloitte-China fell woefully short of professional auditing requirements in numerous component audits of Chinese operations of US issuers and audits of Chinese companies listed on U.S. exchanges.” He added that the enforcement action underscores the need for the PCAOB to be able to inspect Chinese audit firms. 

 

Financial Times

Reuters

Workers who cut their traditional five-day workweek to four days tend to allocate their new free time to sleep, a pilot program shows, leading to improvement in a variety of well-being and productivity measures, including life satisfaction and work-family balance. Employees who moved to 32-hour workweeks logged 7.58 hours per night of sleep, nearly an hour more than when they were keeping 40-hour workweeks, according to lead researcher Juliet Schor, a sociologist and economist at Boston College who is tracking more than 180 organizations globally as they shift to truncated schedules through six-month pilot programs. “I wasn’t surprised that people are getting a little more sleep, but I was surprised at how robust the changes were,” Schor said. The percentage of people considered sleep deprived, getting less than seven hours of nightly sleep, fell from 42.6% to 14.5% on four-day work schedules. Christopher Barnes, a management professor at the University of Washington’s Michael G. Foster School of Business, says the consequences of low sleep include unethical behavior, lower work engagement, less helpful behavior toward colleagues, and more abusive and aggressive leadership tendencies. “Sleep and work are sort of in competition with each other,” Barnes said, “and when you trade sleep for work, it’s problematic. You sacrifice your health and have bad work outcomes.”

 

Bloomberg