Corporations that are taxed under subchapter C of the Internal Revenue Code pay a separate entity-level tax on their income (the corporate income tax) and their owners pay additional tax on corporate dividends and capital gains on sales of corporate shares. Other businesses are taxed as flow-through entities; they file tax returns and report their income but do not pay an entity-level tax. This article discusses the decline in both the share of businesses organized as C corporations and their share of business receipts between 1994 and 2004.

Much of the state tax policy discussion during the past decade has centered on the performance of corporate income taxes and ways to restructure them. This report focuses on state responses to the weak corporate tax collections during the 2000-2003 period as well as to the revenue performance during the years immediately preceding and following the recession. The report is not an attempt to argue that the corporate income tax is an important component of good state tax policy. Instead, our focus is on identifying state tactics to maintain or change the tax, determining whether those strategies are good tax policy, and evaluating whether they are working to achieve the basic goals of the states.

Small business is the source of our entrepreneurial genius, creativity, and productivity. Nonetheless, a substantial portion of our economic activity occurs within large corporations, non-profits and public enterprises. This paper discusses how the federal income tax treats firms of different sizes. It reviews specific provisions favoring small businesses and more general aspects of the federal income tax that may differentially affect firms of different sizes and also discusses how opportunities for tax avoidance and costs of complying with the tax law affect businesses of different size.