Digital Commons Network^™

Green, Or Greed? A Fresh Perspective On The Valuation Of Conservation Easements, Alan L. Feld, Theodore S. Sims, Jacob Nielson

Faculty Scholarship

Charitable contributions of "conservation easements" have since 1980 allowed high-income taxpayers to shelter income from taxation through overvalued deductions. Overvaluation has increased dramatically in the past 20 years: a 2016 study of all easement decisions since 1980 reported that while overvaluation had averaged by a factor of two before 1994, it averaged by a factor of ten for decisions between 1994 and 2016. SOI data disclose that aggregate easement contributions deducted on Schedule A grew from $2.26 billion in 2015 to $6.5 billion in 2018 (the most recent year available). A recent report by supporters of conservation easements acknowledges that …

Tax Complexity And Technology, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Income Tax Code has become increasingly complex over time with the implication that many taxpayers no longer understand the connection between their life decisions and their taxes. Some commentators have suggested that increasing computational complexity may be attributable in part to the proliferation of tax preparation software that renders such complexity manageable at filing time, but otherwise does nothing to mitigate the "black box" nature of the tax system. While such complexity and opacity undercut explicit incentives embedded in the Code, make planning more difficult, and undermine political accountability for taxes, they may also reduce the inefficient distortion …

The Pain Of Paying Taxes, Gary M. Lucas Jr

Faculty Scholarship

With a few caveats, standard economic models assume that, from society’s perspective, the payment of a tax constitutes a costless transfer from the taxpayer to the government. The financial loss to the taxpayer is exactly offset by the financial gain to the government, which can use the resulting tax revenue for the benefit of its citizens. In other words, paying taxes forces taxpayers to forgo private consumption, but the resulting loss in utility can be counterbalanced by an increase in utility from government spending. In fact, if the government spends wisely on beneficial public goods that are undersupplied by private …

Filing While Black: The Casual Racism Of The Tax Law, Steven A. Dean

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Tax Now Or Tax Never: Political Optionality And The Case For Current-Assessment Tax Reform, David Gamage, John R. Brooks

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. income tax system is broken. Due to the realization doctrine and taxpayers’ consequent ability to defer taxation of gains, taxpayers can easily minimize or avoid the taxation of investment income, a failure that is magnified many times over when considering the ultra-wealthy. As a result, this small group of taxpayers commands an enormous share of national wealth yet pays paltry taxes relative to the economic income their wealth produces—a predicament that this Article condemns as being economically, politically, and socially harmful. The conventional view among tax law experts has assumed that the problems created by the realization doctrine …

World Tax Policy In The World Tax Polity? An Event History Analysis Of Oecd/G20 Beps Inclusive Framework Membership, Shu-Yi Oei

Faculty Scholarship

The last decade has seen the emergence of a new global tax order spearheaded by the OECD and G20 and characterized by increased multilateral consensus and cooperation. This new order appears to reflect the emergence of a new “world tax polity” with shared structures, practices, and norms, which have been shaped through the work of the OECD, G20, and other global actors. But what are the pathways by which this new world tax polity has emerged?

Using event history regression methods, this Article investigates this question by studying membership in the OECD/G20 BEPS Inclusive Framework, a multilateral tax agreement among …

Filing While Black: The Casual Racism Of The Tax Law, Steven Dean

Faculty Scholarship

The tax law's race-blind approach produces bad tax policy.' This Essay uses three very different examples to show how failing to openly and honestly address race generates bias, and how devastating the results can be.² Ignoring race does not solve problems; it creates them. ProPublica has shown, for example, that because of the perils of filing income taxes while Black, the five most heavily audited counties in the United States are Black and poor.

The racial bias long tolerated-and sometimes exploited-by tax scholars and policymakers affects all aspects of the tax law. In 1986, Sam Gilliam was denied tax …