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Effective July 1, 2012 Utah has a new compliance weapon added to its arsenal. That would be H.B. 384 - signed by the governor on March 22, 2012.

This may have gone under your radar during these hectic days of the filing season but please note that, once again, both the US House (via H.R. 4123) and the US Senate (via S.1245) are both seeking to make your compliance job that much tougher when it comes to worker classification issues.

JP Morgan Chase agreed to pay a $20 million fine to settle a case filed by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; a case filed because of JP Morgan's role in the demise of Lehman Brothers - specifically via the overextension of credit for approximately the two years leading up to Lehman's bankruptcy in 2008.

Though we acknowledge that issues surrounding worker classification and those associated with unclaimed property are still among the most important facing you this compliance season - take note: a challenger has emerged.

The TIR Answer Center handles all kinds of 1099/1042-S related questions. Here are two questions added earlier today to our database (currently featuring from the past two years alone hundreds of questions with answers provided). However, we don't want you to just review them. Instead turn these relatively simple questions into a training tool of your own. Here's how:

If you are an online business with a physical presence in Pennsylvania then bewarned. Effective this upcoming September you had better be ready to be compliant with new rules on licensing and sales tax collection.

According to the IRS companies are allowed to file what are known as "consolidated returns" - returns filed assuming that they are part of the same parent corporation and assuming that one of the companies involved is at least 80% owned by the other company.

Is your organization on the cutting edge? So often when it comes to dealing with tax compliance issues organizations segment their operations - U.S. Federal Reporting is one category; State & Local Reporting is another with Sales & Use and Unclaimed Property Issues often further seperated out from there; and, of course, there is the Non-Resident Alien compliance and reporting concerns as yet another.

On February 18, 2012 a worker classification related lawsuit was filed in federal district court against LEO Pharma Inc. In this instance sales representatives are suing LEO Pharma because they were misclassified by LEO Pharma as salaried exempt employees and thus not eligible to receive overtime pay which they were otherwise entitled under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

Early this month, on February 1st, a former unpaid intern for the Hearst Corporation's fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar filed a lawsuit against Hearst. The intern claims she was as an unpaid intern but was forced to work as a full time employee without being compensated for her work, thus violating federal and state wage, hour, and tax laws regarding the proper classification of interns vs. workers.