[In this very special “throwback” edition of the Texas Tax Round Up, newly reemerged from out the Super-Saragossa Sea of the Internet, we travel back to a much simpler time—February 2022.]

Howdy y’all!  Has it been a month already?  We’ve got another action-packed month of Comptroller-related news.  Here we go!

Court Cases

Courts of Appeals

Hegar v. Black, Mann, and Graham, L.L.P., No. 03-20-00391-CV (Tex. App.—Austin Feb. 25, 2022)

• The Texas Third Court of Appeals held that a taxpayer may self-assess and pay tax under protest for subsequent periods after the filing of a protest suit and include those periods in the suit by amending the petition— in other words, there’s no requirement that the Comptroller actually assess tax for those periods. Thus, the Court of Appeals upheld that the District Court’s denial of the Comptroller’s plea to the jurisdiction for those subsequent periods.
• On the merits, however, the Court of Appeals held that the taxpayer—a law firm that specialized in preparing loan packages for lending institutions—purchased taxable data processing (instead of nontaxable legal or paralegal) services from vendors when the vendors created an interface between each lenders’ loan origination systems and the vendors’ document generation systems that produced the loan package, which the law firm then reviewed to ensure the legal requirements were met.

Proposed Rules

Franchise Tax

Read More