Changes

The "Innovation Promotion Act of 2015" was released as a discussion draft on July 31, 2015. The act promotes a reduction of taxes to 10% for income from intellectual property. It also proposes qualifying tax distributions of qualifying intellectual property from a controlled foreign corporation to the US parent company. This act is indicative of the United States' effort to attract and foster more innovation and research.

Executive Summary

The Act, as written has a broad scope in terms of qualified property and gross receipts, and has three potential normative economic justifications.

The first normative economic justification is in stimulating innovation. Other Acts (Patent Act, R&D tax credits, etc.) share this justification. This Act’s incentives are not sufficiently orthogonal and are less clearly coupled to desired activity as compared with pre-existing legislation that this economic justification would likely be better pursued by extending pre-existing legislation or developing new legislation.