Richard L. Cram is the director of the Multistate Tax Commission’s National Nexus Program, which offers a multistate voluntary disclosure program. He thanks Michael Fatale, Brian Hamer, and Helen Hecht for their helpful suggestions concerning this article. This article states the author’s own views, which are not necessarily those of the MTC.
In this viewpoint, Cram responds to a recent State Tax Notes article by Martin Eisenstein and Nathaniel Bessey, arguing that Public Law 86-272 implicitly preempts states’ ability to impose net income tax on a cloud computing service provider’s income if the provider has no in-state business activities. Cram writes that the federal statute contains no implicit preemption and is unlikely to protect cloud computing service providers’ income.
Click here to read the article, originally published on September 24, 2018 edition of the State Tax Notes, by Richard Cram.