Sourcing Archives

Finding the Market Through the Looking Glass: California Issues Sales Factor Sourcing Guidance

March 30, 2022 By Maria Eberle, Lindsay LaCava and Rob Galloway 3 Mins Read

California’s long-anticipated market-based sourcing “guidance” is finally out. Legal Ruling No. 2022-01 provides the Franchise Tax Board’s take on how to find the market in certain business-to-business sales. Though the guidance emphasizes that a seller should look to where its direct customer receives the benefit of sales of services, it keeps with current market-based sourcing trends amongst states and directs taxpayers to source such receipts based on the location of the taxpayer’s customer’s customer. The…

Washington DOR Responds to the LendingTree Decision: Benefit of the Service May Still Occur at the Customer’s Customer Location

August 5, 2020 By Mark Yopp 4 Mins Read

On July 21, the Washington Department of Revenue (“DOR”) issued its analysis of the Court of Appeals’ decision from March 30, 2020, in LendingTree, LLC v. Dep’t of Revenue, no. 80637-8-I (Wash. App. Ct. Mar. 30, 2020). As set forth in the analysis, from the DOR’s perspective, the LendingTree court followed the existing Washington Business and Occupation tax (“B&O”) attribution rules and guidance and did not create a new interpretive legal framework.[1] Although the DOR lost the case, and the court held that LendingTree’s receipts could not be sourced based where its customers’ customers were located, the DOR’s response suggests that they are factually distinguishing the case and will continue to attribute receipts to the customer’s customer location if that is where it determines the benefit of the services occurs.

To Market We Go Again: Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court Defers to Department, Disregards Law Change, and Holds that Cost of Performance Sourcing was Always Market

July 28, 2020 By Maria Eberle, Lindsay LaCava and Nicole Ford 11 Mins Read

On Friday, July 24, 2020, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania issued its decision and order on the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue’s motion to intervene in the highly-anticipated case of Synthes USA HQ, Inc. v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, No. 108 F.R. 2016. The Synthes case is noteworthy not only because the Commonwealth Court addresses, for the first time, the Department of Revenue’s hotly debated interpretation of the state’s former “costs of performance” statute, but also because…

Texas Court Delivers a Sirius Change to Sourcing Methodology for Services

May 20, 2020 By Stephen Long and Trevor Mauck 3 Mins Read

The Texas Court of Appeals recently issued a decision that applied market-based sourcing for services, despite the state’s statute that requires the sourcing of receipts to the location where the service is performed. In Hegar v. Sirius XM Radio Inc., No. 03-18-00573-CV (Tex. App. Austin, 2020), the court narrowly defined the scope of “performance” as the final act that gets the service to the customer, thereby ignoring all of the costs that went into the performance and production of the service up to that point. Such an application produces a result that equates to market-based sourcing.