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A case before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is a threat to the ability of the Commonwealth to limit its exposure to liability through the enactment of damages caps. This is important because uncapped liability verdicts could wipe out funds set aside for critical government services, leading to ever higher taxes.

Internal Revenue Code Section 1031 permits taxpayers to defer paying tax on gain for federal income tax purposes when they invest in real estate and exchange one property for another property. In Pennsylvania, whether or not taxpayers can defer gain pursuant to Section 1031 for state personal income tax purposes has been contested for years. In Pearlstein v. Commonwealth, the decision from the state Supreme Court will be a test as to whether the DOR can effectively ignore the language of its own statutes and corresponding regulations.

Any given property contains a multitude of different assets, and each of them can be expected to have a different useful life. In a cost segregation study, engineers identify and quantify building assets and then assign each asset a cost. These costs are then segregated into different categories. By segregating assets into shorter-lived categories, they can be depreciated more quickly, resulting in tax savings and increased cash flow.