Was Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin right to exclude, from her taxes, thousands of dollars in per diems for days that she worked outside the state capital?

Steve R. Johnson, associate dean at the University of Nevada’s William S. Boyd School of Law, will write “Interpretation Matters,” a monthly column for State Tax Notes on interpretive approaches to laws, constitutions and regulations that govern state taxes.

“The state tax area continues to evolve at a staggering pace,” Jeffrey A. Friedman, Michele Borens, and Charles C. Kearns write in the inaugural issue of “A Pinch of SALT,” the new monthly column that the Sutherland law firm will write for State Tax Notes.

“[O]ur tax system is working against us,” David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, writes in this week’s Tax Notes.

Tax Analysts releases today a briefing book for reporters and others who want to learn about how wealthy individuals and corporations avoid U.S. taxes by transferring their assets, investments, and earnings to overseas locations.

Tax Analysts said today it has begun inspecting e-mails that the IRS Office of Chief Counsel sent to field offices and that it has found examples of chief counsel advice (CCA) that the IRS should have voluntarily disclosed earlier to comply with federal law.

Tax Analysts and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) announced today that they have joined forces to provide tax practitioners and lawyers a new kind of information about the activities of the IRS, including the auditing of returns, the collection of taxes, and the enforcement of tax laws.

Corporate tax revenues have dropped by $17.4 billion because U.S.multinational corporations are better able to shift their profits overseas, Tax Notes magazine reports this week.

The President, Members of Congress, and Supreme Court justices do not pay Social Security taxes, giving them an extra $6,045 a year in take-home pay, Tax Notes reports in this week's issue.