Stephanie Lipinski Galland and Sonia Shaikh wrote “A Comprehensive Guide to the Virginia Local License Tax,” the cover story for the latest issue of Tax Notes States. The Virginia Business Professional and Occupational License (BPOL) tax is a local-level tax levied on businesses’ gross receipts for the “privilege” of doing business within a locality.

Stephanie and Sonia worked on the treatise for two years and believe it will be widely cited because there are no recent articles examining BPOL despite changes to the law.

“Although the method of calculating BPOL appears relatively straightforward in theory, based on the prior year’s gross receipts and filed annually, its application varies significantly across localities due to differences in classification systems and local ordinances,” they wrote. “For taxpayers, this means that BPOL planning begins not with the tax return, but with the fundamental decisions of where to locate employees, how to structure entities and how to classify and document business activities.”

Click here to read the article. Tax Notes is a publication of Tax Analysts, an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to transparency, education and community in tax policy.