News & Events

Over the past 10 years, the scope of the North Carolina Department of Revenue’s authority to force affiliated corporations to file combined returns has become one of the most controversial aspects of North Carolina’s corporate income tax laws. The statute granting this authority has been criticized in recent years for the vague standard it establishes for determining when the Department of Revenue is justified in requiring a combined return. In the 2011 legislative session, presumably in response to this criticism, the North Carolina General Assembly repealed G.S. 105-130.6, replacing it with more detailed guidelines in new G.S. 105-130.5A. As explained in this article, while this new statute creates new, taxpayer-friendly procedural limitations on the Department’s ability to compel combined reporting, the substantive guidelines of G.S. 105-130.5A provide the Department with a significant amount of discretion in determining whether to require a combined report, and it is therefore unclear whether the new statute will actually provide taxpayers with the clarity the statute’s proponents were seeking.

Many organizations across a wide range of industries use two-way radios for internal communications between and among personnel, and many of these two-way radios are licensed under Part 90 of the FCC’s rules. The FCC has imposed a January 1, 2013, deadline for certain Part 90 licensees in the Industrial/Business Pool and the Public Safety Pool to modify their operations and FCC licenses to meet certain “narrowband” (12.5 kHz or narrower) requirements in the 150-174 MHz (VHF) and 421-512 MHz (UHF) frequency bands. These narrowbanding requirements apply only to Part 90 licenses that operate in these frequency bands.