Digital Commons Network^™

Holding Intellectual Property, Xuan-Thao Nguyen

Articles

The collapse of WorldCom, Inc., exposed a complex web of accounting irregularities. Within that web, recent filings by Dick Thornburgh, WorldCom's Bankruptcy Court Examiner, reveal a different type of scheme that involves the holding of intellectual property. Further scrutinizing the scheme reveals that WorldCom and its tax advisors, KPMG Peat Marwick LLP (KPMG), devised a tax avoidance scheme through the creation of an intellectual property holding company (IP holding company). This type of scheme has been widely and quietly utilized in the last twenty years by many corporations with substantial intellectual property.

Indeed, as state taxing authorities have become more …

Tax Law Uncertainty And The Role Of Tax Insurance, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

In the broadest sense, this is an article about legal or regulatory uncertainty and the role that private and public insurance can play in managing it. More narrowly, the article is about tax law enforcement and the familiar if ill-defined distinctions between tax evasion, tax avoidance, and abusive tax avoidance. Most specifically, the article is about a new type of tax risk insurance policy, sometimes called tax indemnity insurance or transactional tax risk insurance that provides coverage against the risk that the Internal Revenue Service (Service) will disallow a taxpayer-insured's tax treatment of a particular transaction. The question is whether …