The Port of Everett’s 10th Street boat launch, the largest in the state, was shut down on Tuesday for maintenance dredging. The facility will remain closed until mid-February as workers remove sediment deposited in the area from the Snohomish River. KC Equipment will remove about 30,000 cubic yards of sediment, about 3,000 truck loads. The work will continue around the clock and is expected to be completed by Feb. 15, but could go longer, port officials said. “This project is essential to providing reliable boating access to the Puget Sound,” said Carl Wollebek, the ports chief of operations. “The port regrets any inconvenience to local boaters while this project is ongoing.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is dredging the river at the same time.
IRS to require firms to flag tax breaks
The Internal Revenue Service plans to start requiring large corporations to disclose on their tax returns whether they are taking tax breaks that might be unacceptable to the IRS. Large corporate tax filings are often complex, with some firms taking tax breaks that fall into a gray area of tax law. IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said Tuesday that requiring firms to flag those “uncertain tax positions” for IRS examiners would improve enforcement. Firms must already disclose in financial reports that they have taken such tax positions, but the reports are not usually detailed enough to help IRS examiners.
EBay eliminates some listing fees
EBay hopes to lure more sellers by essentially doing away with “listing” fees for people who occasionally auction items on its site. Instead it will take a cut of the final selling price. EBay has tinkered with its fee structure in recent years in hopes of improving the experience people have on its site and reinvigorating its growth. Changes such as the ones announced Tuesday are meant to encourage more people to list items for sale. EBay Inc. told sellers that starting March 30 they will be able to post up to 100 items for auction every 30 days without paying fees to list them. The items must have a starting bid of less than $1, and when they sell eBay will take 9 percent of the final price or $50, whichever is less.
Yahoo Inc. earnings grow to $153 million
Yahoo Inc. moved further down the road to recovery in the fourth quarter as online advertising began to snap out of a yearlong stupor to ease the Internet company’s long-running slump. Yahoo earned $153 million, or 11 cents per share, during the final three months of 2009, rebounding from a loss of $303 million, or 22 cents per share, in the prior year. The results released Tuesday represented Yahoo’s best performance since the company hired Silicon Valley veteran Carol Bartz as chief executive a year ago. Bartz has been vowing since her arrival to engineer a turnaround that eluded her two predecessors, Terry Semel and Jerry Yang.
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