NEW YORK – Federal, state, and local agencies are offering an increasingly wide array of incentives to attract and retain businesses — many awarded on a discretionary basis, according to a new white paper, Let’s Make a Deal: Understanding the Opportunities in Discretionary Incentives, from Thomson Reuters Checkpoint.

Each year, there is approximately $80 billion available in credits and incentives, much of which goes unclaimed. 77 percent of Thomson Reuters tax customers recently surveyed do not spend any time researching credits and incentives. 68 percent of business customers who do take advantage of these opportunities indicated that their business realized tax savings, with 28 percent (the largest group) of those customers’ businesses exceeding $1 million in savings.

“Many firms fail to maximize their savings because they simply don’t have the time or resources to stay up-to-date on the latest credits and incentives,” said Gayathri Narayan, director of the State and Local Tax Practice Segment with the Tax & Accounting business of Thomson Reuters. “Our Credits and Incentives products tackle the challenge of researching these opportunities, providing the information needed to pinpoint applicable credits and incentives while saving firms time and money.”

“Companies need to understand a wide variety of potential discretionary incentives, including those relating to job creation, workforce training, infrastructure, enterprise zones, and deal-closing funds — to name just a few,” says Virginia Lorenzo, senior director of Editorial with the Tax & Accounting business of Thomson Reuters.

The paper, based on the research of EY, explains and provides examples of the different types of discretionary incentives available to businesses and shares best practices for investigating and securing them.

The paper is available for download at tax.thomsonreuters.com/CreditsIncentives.

Thomson Reuters Checkpoint Credits and Incentives Pinpointer: Statutory and Discretionary is a web-based tool that enables companies to search for incentives by location, credit type, and industry in order to evaluate their eligibility.

The company recently introduced a related product, Credits and Incentives Batch, to help users process large volumes of addresses to identify all the available credits for specific locations. When a corporation has several locations or a large employee base, Credits and Incentives Batch is the way to go. The Batch products deliver a solution to a nearly impossible research challenge. They check each address against the boundaries of every available zone-based credit to identify matches at a rate of 250 addresses per minute. The research time saved is dramatic. Because these searches are accomplished so quickly and inexpensively, customers can check for changes more frequently. This maximizes access to all available credit opportunities

Thomson Reuters Checkpoint is the leading global brand of knowledge solutions for tax and accounting professionals. Checkpoint is a robust, comprehensive, and interactive offering which provides integrated research, editorial insight, productivity tools, online learning and news updates along with intelligent linking to related content and software. With our respected content, Checkpoint is relied on by thousands of tax and accounting professionals, including 97 of the Top 100 U.S. law firms, 96 of the Fortune 100 companies, and 99 of the top 100 U.S. CPA firms.

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