International businesses took a hit yesterday when the House passed, and the President immediately signed, a bill to provide some $26 billion in funding to the states to cover teacher salaries and Medicaid shortfalls. Close to $10 billion of that will come from a bunch of international tax provisions mostly targeting corporate taxpayers. more

Five states — California, Kentucky, Minnesota, Nebraska, and North Dakota — as well as the District of Columbia have increased their gas tax rates in the past few months, according to a report from information services and software provider CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business. California’s tax nearly doubled in the past year, from 18 cents to 35.3 cents per gallon. more

Calls for a VAT for the United States have subsided somewhat in recent weeks, as the Bush tax cuts have taken center stage in the national debate on fiscal responsibility.

That’s a relief for business leaders. It’s fairly safe to say that most of them are terrified of the whole idea. More than three-quarters of U.S. execs oppose a VAT policy, more than 83 percent believe that it will significantly increase the cost of compliance, the vast majority say that their organization lacks the expertise to comply, and so on and so on, according to a new poll by Sabrix Thomson Reuters. more

Senior finance execs and tax directors come in for a scolding in a new KPMG survey which finds that more than 40 percent of companies haven’t bothered to set up a formal policy or procedure to manage the exam process in case the IRS comes knocking on, or battering down, the door. This despite the fact that audit activity is definitely on the rise. more

A few posts back, inspired by the stunning news that Facebook’s customer satisfaction rating is even worse than that of the IRS’s e-filing program, I wrote about the giant social network’s possible future as a whistle-blower tool for tax authorities in developing countries such as the Philippines.

In a guest blog at the Tax Foundation today, Aaron Merchak stands that idea on its head and asks: Is Facebook actually on the verge of becoming a sovereign state, complete with taxes of its own? more