Tax Savings and Costing (The Case of Transfer Pricing)

Please prepare a report answering the listed questions. You may Excel to create spreadsheets and copy the answers to this document.

Hansen, Kotter, and Zales is a law firm that contains one service department (Research & Document) and two production departments (Litigation and Consulting). The firm employs a job-order costing system to accumulate costs chargeable to each client. The firm uses actual costing to assign overhead. General overhead costs can be allocated based on either direct attorney hours or the number of employees, depending on managers choice. At the end of the year, the records revealed the actual general overhead costs are $720,000. At the end of the year, the records revealed the following costs and operating data for all cases handled during the year:

		Research & Document			Litigation		Consulting
# of Employees		10			8		6
Direct Attorney Hours(# of hrs)		3,000			8,000		5,000
Direct Attorney Costs ($)		$150,000			$400,000		$250,000
Direct Material Costs ($)		$16,000			$15,500		$13,500

*** 50% of Research & Department's service is provided to litigation department and the other 50% to consulting department.

Assume that the company uses attorney hours to allocate general overhead costs. For litigation department, the costs charged to each case are made up of four elements:

• Direct attorney costs (charged at $50 per hour)
• Direct materials and supplies used
• General overheads are applied by direct attorney hours
• Costs allocated from the service department is assigned to cases by direct attorney hours incurred within the department

The information on one of its cases during this period is given as follows:

Case 618

Direct attorney-hours 150

Direct Materials and supplies $5000

1. (1.5 point) What are the total costs accumulated for Case 618? The company charged the client $30,000 for the service, what is the profit the company earned?

d. (0.5 point) Suppose the firms annual revenue is 2 million dollars. The corporate tax rate is 35%. How much taxes shall the company pay? Does the choice of cost driver affect the total taxes due?