Law Commons^™

The Pay Or Play Penalty Under The Affordable Care Act: Emerging Issues, Kathryn L. Moore

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Affordable Care Act does not require that employers provide employees with health care coverage. It does, however, impose an excise tax on large employers that fail to offer their employees affordable employer-sponsored health care coverage. The excise tax, commonly referred to as a “pay-or-play penalty,” was scheduled to go into effect beginning in 2014. The United States Treasury Department (“Treasury”), however, has delayed enforcement of the penalty until 2015 for employers with 100 or more full-time employees, and until 2016 for employers with 50 to 99 employees.

Implementation of the pay-or-play penalty has given rise to a host of …

Solving Charity Failures, Brian L. Frye

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

“Crowdfunding” is a way of using the Internet to raise money by asking the public to contribute to a project. In the past, asking a large number of people to contribute small amounts of money to a project was expensive and inefficient for most organizations and individuals. By greatly reducing transaction costs, crowdfunding enables anyone to inexpensively and efficiently seek small contributions to a project. While crowdfunding is a new model of fundraising, it has already transformed funding for the arts. For example, the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter distributed more than forty million dollars to the creators of almost seventy-five hundred …

Death, Taxes, And Property (Rights): Nozick, Libertarianism, And The Estate Tax, Jennifer Bird-Pollan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The primary purpose of this Article is to dispute the moral claims to post-death property rights made by libertarians when they argue against the estate tax. As I will show later in this Article, my argument does not necessarily entail enacting an estate tax, nor does it require a particular level of tax. I am merely trying to demonstrate that those who argue that the estate tax is an immoral violation of the private property rights of the deceased are mistaken. This is not to say that the estate of the deceased should necessarily pass to the government. It is …

A Diversity Theory Of Charitable Tax Exemption—Beyond Efficiency, Through Critical Race Theory, Toward Diversity, David A. Brennen

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

What is the normative rationale for the federal income tax exemption for nonprofit charitable corporations? Even though the exemption dates back to 1894, Congress has failed to fully rationalize it. Though scholars and courts have attempted over the years to come up with a coherent rationale for the charitable tax exemption, their attempts are focused almost exclusively on economic efficiency. Thus, the charitable tax exemption is typically framed by noted tax scholars like Boris Bittker, Henry Hansmann, and others as an economically efficient means of providing certain goods and services to the public. Rationalizing the charitable tax exemption in economic …

2002 Eleventh Circuit Survey: Federal Taxation, David A. Brennen

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

During 2002 federal courts in the United States decided nineteen cases that directly impact federal tax law in the Eleventh Circuit. These cases involve a variety of tax law matters including Federal Insurance Contributions Act ("FICA") payroll tax, estate and gift tax, IRS authority to levy and assess tax, and discharges in bankruptcy. Other tax-related matters addressed by courts in 2002 that impact tax law in the Eleventh Circuit include inventory recapture in an S-corporation conversion, attorney fees for the prevailing party in a tax dispute, and injunctions against tax preparers. By far the most important tax case decided in …

Race Conscious Affirmative Action By Tax Exempt 501(C)(3) Corporations After Grutter And Gratz, David A. Brennen

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment generally acts as a legal limit on the permissible bounds of government action. Accordingly, public universities and other government entities are constitutionally prohibited from engaging in acts that violate equal protection of the laws. The Supreme Court recently reinforced this point when it ruled, in two related cases, that public universities may consider the race of applicants when making admissions decisions, so long as an applicant's race does not amount to a deciding factor when granting admission. By its very terms, the constitutional limitation imposed by the Equal Protection Clause only directly …

State And Local Taxation: When Will Congress Intervene?, Kathryn L. Moore

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article examines congressional activity in the state and local tax area to determine when, if ever, Congress will enact legislation mandating uniformity in state and local taxation. The article begins by briefly describing our current system of state and local taxation and explaining why we need more uniformity therein.

The article then provides an empirical study of congressional activity in the state and local tax area between January, 1971 and May, 1996. Specifically, it focuses first on four discrete but representative areas in which Congress has enacted legislation regulating state and local taxation, and, second, on four discrete but …

The Proposed Corporate Sponsorship Regulations: Is The Treasury Department "Sleeping With The Enemy"?, David A. Brennen

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In 1993, the Treasury Department (the Treasury) issued a proposed regulation outlining when money received by a charity from a corporate sponsor would be subject to federal income tax. In defining the phrase "trade or business," the proposed regulation addresses the extent to which sponsorship payments to charities will be treated by the Treasury as having been made in return for advertising on behalf of the sponsor, thus subjecting the payment to income tax. In the proposed regulation, the Treasury concludes that a charity's use of a corporate sponsor's name in the title of a charitable event is a mere …

The Relationship Of Federal Income Taxes To Toxic Wastes: A Selective Study, Richard A. Westin

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

More demanding federal regulation, universal local opposition to waste treatment and disposal facilities, and increased long-term liabilities for waste sites have substantially restricted the supply of licensed waste handlers and have sharply increased the costs of waste disposal. As a result of increased costs and downstream liabilities for cleanup, industrial generators have begun to examine more closely their waste management practices and opportunities they may have to reduce the amount of hazardous waste they generate.

The urgent need to marshal the full range of industrial strategies to achieve significant reduction in the amount and toxicity of hazardous waste and the …