Companies are getting nervous about tax issues related to their expatriate employees and business travelers. And rightly so.

Mercer today released some findings from its soon-to-be-published Global Mobility Compliance Issues Survey of businesses in the U.S. and Canada. The biggest compliance worry, reported by 61 percent of respondents, was the potential for tax return problems resulting from inaccurate reporting by expats of their worldwide income. Another 25 percent identified the associated fines and penalties as an important compliance risk.

A couple of findings point to tax risks related to international business travelers who, as the report amusingly puts it, “often fly under the radar.” Forty-five percent of companies don’t bother to track the movement of these folks, and nearly 60 percent lack a policy to ensure that they track their own travel. more

It’s the end of the week, the beginning of a new month, and it’s been a busy couple of days on the tax news beat. Here are some stories that caught my eye:

Study: California Tax Breaks Are Job Killers. California voters are being asked to overturn three tax breaks for businesses that passed a couple of years ago. A new study estimates that taxes account for only 1.8 percent of the cost of doing business in the state, so the tax breaks have a negligible effect on private sector jobs — but the loss of revenue will force the state to lay off 22,000 employees. The San Bernadino Sun has the story here, or you can download the full study (a 13-page pdf) here. more

It’s fascinating to compare the attitudes of people in different countries in the great debate about how best to reduce the mountains of public debt that have accumulated globally in the wake of the economic crisis. A couple of items that came my way today contained some real surprises. more

How much would you say it costs, per employee, for a small company to comply with federal tax regulations? We’re talking just compliance costs here, average per year, for businesses with fewer than 20 employees. Any guesses? more

The ABB Group, a provider of automation and power technologies, is one of the world’s biggest conglomerates, so when I got wind of an indirect tax software initiative at the firm, I was eager to find out about it. I talked with Peggi Rockefeller, director of sales, property, and indirect tax, who explained how ABB is pulling a very impressive ROI from the project.

John Cummings: When did you implement your transaction tax solution?

Peggi Rockefeller: We chose to upgrade our tax technology to coincide with a major ERP implementation — we were moving 20 ERPs to one version of SAP! At the time, we only had a few bolt-on sales tax modules for certain businesses; I realized that we absolutely had to have one standard solution for taxation, and I wanted to go Web-based.

The process started in 2008 with blueprinting the solution, and it was basically a two-year implementation process through Q1 2010. Actually, we started with 19 ERPs, but in the midst of our process we acquired another company that had to be integrated into the new landscape in Q1 of 2010. At that point, we were easily able to migrate the acquisition into SAP and Vertex. Overall, though, this project had a very aggressive time line because you’re talking about literally dozens of divisions. There were many who said it couldn’t be done. more