Thursday’s business headlines

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) – Here’s a look at Thursday’s business headlines.

TikTok

TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company is reportedly in talks with the U.S. government about a possible deal to avoid an outright sale of the popular app’s U.S. operations.

ByteDance and top U.S. officials are negotiating possible arrangements that would allow it to maintain some ownership stake in TikTok while still satisfying the U.S.’s demand that China have no way to access user data.

COVID fraud

Americans have lost over $124 million as a result of the more than 184,000 novel coronavirus-related fraud cases reported nationwide through the end of August.

The Motley Fool says fraudsters preyed upon fears by scamming people into paying inflated prices for hard-to-get products or spending money on bogus virus cures and prevention treatments.

Some examples of COVID-19 fraud include identity theft related to a stolen stimulus payment, bogus at-home virus tests or vaccines and job and health insurance scams.

Indiana has $910,000 in COVID-related fraud claims.

Taxes

A number of new tax issues are cropping up as employees work from home.

One big change is that people, specifically those who have been working remotely, may have to file multiple state income tax returns this year.

Typically, a worker is required to file a return in his or her state of residence as well as where he or she works, if those states are different.

Many workers may be faced, however, with different circumstances this year if they opted to work remotely in a state other than their typical primary residence.

Jobless claims

Another 850,000 Americans are expected to have filed for the first time unemployment insurance benefits last week such a result would mark the first time since March that jobless claims came in below 1 million for back-to-back weeks.

Last week’s jobless claims appeared to improve considerably from the 1.001 million reported during the previous week. However, this was due to a technical change in the way the labor department made its seasonal adjustments.