Volume 7, Issue 5
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September / October 2010
Security Shredding Storage News
Official Publication of the Security Shredding & Paper Recovery Markets
Inside This Issue 4
Internal Compliance: Three Key Strategies to Improved Information Destruction
8
Chaotics: Managing Organizational Change and Stress in a Turbulent Environment
13 Congress Acts to Ban Export of E-Waste to Developing Countries
FOR SALE Sales of Businesses Face Quandary Over Status of Capital Gains Tax By P.J. Heller
14 Product / Equipment Profiles
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“. . . Nothing is certain but death and taxes.”
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Cartoon by Frederic Serre
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Mentor, OH Permit No. 2
hile Benjamin Franklin’s words have rung true for more than 200 years, the conundrum facing the document destruction and records storage industries in 2010 is how much those taxes will be in coming years. Of particular concern to owners who may be contemplating selling their businesses is the hit they will take from the long-term capital gains tax, which, unless Congress acts before the end of the year, will increase to 20 percent from the current 15 percent rate. With the federal deficit at the end of the 2010 budget year at just under $1.3 trillion — down from the record $1.42 trillion one year earlier — and with healthcare reforms in 2014 kicking in, the uncertainty about how high the capital gains tax may eventually go is the great unknown. “Nobody knows where capital gains taxes are going to go on Jan. 1,” says Jim McGuire, president of Shotgun Capital Advisors, a merger and acquisitions advisory firm in Southlake, Texas. “It seems likely it will revert to 20 percent.” By the time healthcare reform takes full effect, the capital gains tax rate could be at 24 percent, he predicts. “We’re getting ourselves more and more in debt,” notes David Lane, president and chief executive officer of the investment banking firm Lane-Link Group in Rockwall, Texas. “Sooner or later somebody is going to have to pay for it. So even if capital gains rates don’t go up this year, they’re going to go up sooner or later.” What that means is that sellers of document destruction companies and records storage businesses will likely walk away with substantially less money if they sell in the future compared to what they would have realized by cementing a deal in 2010. The impact of a $5 million transaction
today versus a sale in 2011 (assuming the capital gains tax goes to 20 percent) on a seller’s bottom line is equivalent in value to a brand new Ferrari F430, McGuire notes. “Same deal. Same transaction size. And there’s a $250,000 uptick in tax liability on that $5 million transaction,” he says. “That’s significant.” “At the end of the day,” he adds, “it’s not what you get for your business. It’s what you put in your pocket that’s important.” McGuire and Lane early on have counseled their clients who may have been mulling the sale of their businesses to close the deal in 2010 to take advantage of the lower capital gains tax. McGuire’s Shotgun Capital fir m specializes in assisting business owners with the sale of their document destruction, records storage, specialty waste, or security related businesses. Lane’s Lane-Link Group is a full-service investment banking firm dealing with the document destruction and document storage industries; among its services is handling mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, valuations, value creation, recapitalizations and refinancing. Both McGuire and Lane agree that buyers — businesses and private equity groups — are vying today to acquire document destruction and records storage companies but that prices are down significantly from the buying frenzy of a few years ago. The dramatic price decline is somewhat akin to what happened to the housing market when the housing bubble burst. Even so, Lane says private equity groups are competing to purchase businesses, which is helping to drive up prices, even though they are nowhere near what he describes as “the blip” of 24 or 30 months ago.
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