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On July 30, 2020, the IRS released guidance in the form of new frequently asked questions (“FAQs”) addressing the deferral of the employer portion of Social Security taxes under section 2302 of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (“CARES”) Act. These FAQs are broad in nature, providing guidance on various considerations relevant to section…
Our colleagues at the Inside Privacy blog have summarized a proposed bill in California (the Genetic Information Privacy Act) that would impose certain privacy obligations on direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies that go beyond the California Consumer Privacy Act. This summary may be of interest to entities that process genetic data in California.
Secretary Mnuchin acknowledged in an interview today that the employee Social Security tax deferral envisioned in President Trump’s Presidential Memorandum will not be mandatory. The memorandum instructs the Treasury Department to issue guidance under Section 7508A permitting employers to suspend the withholding, depositing, and payment of the employee’s share of social security taxes (and the…
A little over a month ago, the deadline for appealing the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Mozilla v. FCC expired. The Mozilla decision upheld the FCC’s 2017 Restoring Internet Freedom Order (“Order”), which rolled back Obama-era net neutrality regulations to largely deregulate broadband internet service provider (“ISP”) practices. No party sought Supreme Court review of the…
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Software development can teach us a lot about streamlining the research and development (R&D) process in other industries. “Agile development”, or the process of dividing up an R&D project into smaller, more iterative segments instead of planning the entire project at its inception, is a hallmark of the software development process. In a recently published…
On 3 July 2020, the German parliament passed a draft bill (German language) for patient data protection and for more digitalisation in the German healthcare system (Patientendaten-Schutz-Gesetz). The draft bill is currently in the legislative procedure and is expected to enter into force in autumn 2020.
One of the main objectives of the…
The National Institute for Standards and Technology released the draft of NIST Special Publication 800-172 (“NIST SP 800-172”) on July 6, 2020. This draft special publication succeeds the prior draft NIST SP 800-171B that NIST published in June 2019, and operates as a supplement to the NIST SP 800-171 controls that federal contractors generally must…
On Saturday, August 8, President Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum directing the Secretary of the Treasury to “use his authority pursuant to [Code section] 7508A to defer the withholding, deposit, and payment of the tax imposed by [Code section] 3101(a) . . . on wages . . . paid during the period of September 1, 2020, through December 31, 2020,”…
