Md. Digital Ad Tax Challengers Defend State, Federal Suits
The Tax Injunction Act (TIA) doesn’t bar businesses’ challenge of Maryland’s digital ad tax, said the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in a Monday brief at U.S. District Court in Greenbelt, Maryland. A “principally punitive” assessment is a penalty, not a…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
tax, said plaintiffs in case 1:21-cv-410-LKG. “Countless individual refund suits spanning many years -- all pending while the Act’s highly burdensome penalty is being exacted -- would not be an ‘efficient’ state-court alternative to a single, pre-enforcement federal-court challenge, within the meaning of the TIA.” Plaintiffs “are waiting for a decision and have no expected timeline,” emailed their attorney Stephen Kranz of McDermott Will. The court hasn’t scheduled oral argument. In state litigation against the same law, Comcast and Verizon last week opposed the Maryland comptroller’s motion to dismiss case C-02-cv-21-000509 at the Maryland Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County. The comptroller argued plaintiffs must first exhaust administrative remedies by waiting to be assessed the tax and challenging it in state tax court or paying the tax and filing a refund claim with the comptroller, but plaintiffs can’t do either until 2023, the telecom companies said. “There is a long history of this State’s courts hearing and deciding constitutional challenges to newly enacted statutes where plaintiffs claim that the statute was beyond the power or authority of the legislature to adopt.”