New Solution Helps Businesses Access $60 Billion in Available Tax Credits and Incentives

Thomson Reuters has released Checkpoint Credits and Incentives Pinpointer, a web-based tool that enables businesses to easily identify statutory credits and incentives that are available per industry or location.

As the U.S. economy continues to recover from the Great Recession, federal, state, and local governments are incentivizing investment and job creation to stimulate economic growth, resulting in approximately $60 billion in available federal, state, and local credits and incentives (C&I).

Claiming these credits can be difficult and evidence suggests businesses are not taking advantage of all of the C&I for which they are eligible.

“Many C&I programs are tied to specific geographical areas,” said Gayathri Narayan, segment lead for the State and Local Tax practice at Thomson Reuters. “And business or employee addresses must fall within specific boundaries of a federal, state, or local incentive zone. With our tool a practitioner can save hours of research time by quickly identifying applicable credits, reviewing them at a glance, delving into the details as needed, and making well-informed business decisions – all in one place.”

Checkpoint Credits and Incentives Pinpointer is the first integrated tool on the market that has been specifically designed to meet the needs of a C&I practitioner. It not only provides specific location-based searching, but also the ability to search credits by jurisdiction, credit type, or industry.

Crowe Horwath, a Top 10 public accounting firm whose C&I practice has helped clients apply for and obtain millions of dollars in incentives, is an early adopter of Checkpoint Credits and Incentives Pinpointer.

Crowe Horwath staff plug addresses into the tool to identify zone-based credits and incentives and conduct further research on Thomson Reuters Checkpoint to find the applicable qualifications and specific requirements.

“The state brochures will oftentimes refer to the statutes, but there can be ambiguity between what might be on the state website and the actual statute itself,” said Dean Uminski, a principal at Crowe Horwath who created the firm’s state and local tax practice in 1998, “Our clients are signing incentive agreements under penalties of perjury; we need to thoroughly understand all of the tax laws. We use Checkpoint to get the authoritative statutes on those programs — and we use that research as backup documentation in each of our project files.”

Checkpoint provides integrated research, news, analysis, learning, and productivity tools for tax, audit, accounting, legal, trade, and finance professionals.