Law Commons^™

Enough Is As Good As A Feast, Noah C. Chauvin

Seattle University Law Review

Ipse Dixit, the podcast on legal scholarship, provides a valuable service to the legal community and particularly to the legal academy. The podcast’s hosts skillfully interview guests about their legal and law-related scholarship, helping those guests communicate their ideas clearly and concisely. In this review essay, I argue that Ipse Dixit has made a major contribution to legal scholarship by demonstrating in its interview episodes that law review articles are neither the only nor the best way of communicating scholarly ideas. This contribution should be considered “scholarship,” because one of the primary goals of scholarship is to communicate new ideas.

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

International Tax: Tax Treaties, Kim Brooks

OER Texts

This compendium of materials is designed to support the study of tax treaties around the world.

A Positive Dialectic: Beps And The United States, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

This essay addresses the interaction between the changes in the international tax regime identified by Mason and U.S. international tax policy. Specifically, I will argue that contrary to the general view, the United States actively implemented the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) recommendations through the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA). Moreover, the changes of the TCJA influenced the current OECD effort of BEPS 2.0. Thus, the current state of affairs can be characterized as a constructive dialogue: The OECD moves (BEPS 1), the United States responds (TCJA), the OECD …

Front Matter (Letter From The Editor, Masthead, Etc.)

The Contemporary Tax Journal

No abstract provided.

The Tax Treatment Of Haircuts In Financial Reorganizations, Aurelio Gurrea-Martinez, Vincent Ooi

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Over the past few years, Singapore has implemented various ambitious insolvency reforms aimed at making the country an international hub for debt restructuring. This article argues that while Singapore has put in place one of the most sophisticated restructuring frameworks in the world, some tax reforms might be useful to maximise the potential of this new restructuring framework. Namely, it will be pointed out that the tax treatment of debt forgiveness granted by creditors in corporate reorganisation (‘haircuts’) should be reviewed. Under the current legislation, these haircuts may be treated as taxable income. As a result, financially distressed debtors may …

South Dakota V. Wayfair: An Ill-Conceived Blow To The Free Flow Of Interstate Commerce, Revel Shinn Atkinson

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

For more than a century, brick-and-mortar retailers have been losing local customers—first with the rise of mail-order houses and then more acutely with the rapid growth of online retail. As a result, states have noticed a significant loss in sales tax revenue. While an equivalent amount of tax is typically still owed to the state in the form of a use tax, which is to be remitted to the state by the customer, because these taxes are not automatically collected at the time of the sale, customers have overwhelmingly elected not to pay them. In an effort to recover this …

Tax Treaties, The Constitution, And The Noncompulsory Payment Rule, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

US Tax treaties have been regarded as self-executing since the first treaty (with France) was ratified in 1932. Rebecca Kysar has argued this raises a doubt on whether the treaties are constitutional, because tax treaties (like other treaties) are negotiated by the executive branch and ratified by the Senate with no involvement by the House, and all tax-raising measures must originate in the House under the Origination Clause (U.S. Const. Art I, section 7, clause 7). Her preferred solution is to make tax treaties non-self executing, but that would reverse the universal practice since 1932, and is therefore unlikely. Moreover, …

Racialized Tax Inequity: Wealth, Racism, And The U.S. System Of Taxation, Palma Joy Strand, Nicholas A. Mirkay

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

This Article describes the connection between wealth inequality and the increasing structural racism in the U.S. tax system since the 1980s. A long-term sociological view (the why) reveals the historical racialization of wealth and a shift in the tax system overall beginning around 1980 to protect and exacerbate wealth inequality, which has been fueled by racial animus and anxiety. A critical tax view (the how) highlights a shift over the same time period at both federal and state levels from taxes on wealth, to taxes on income, and then to taxes on consumption—from greater to less progressivity. Both of these …

Summaries From The 2019 35th Annual Tei-Sjsu High Tech Tax Institute, Hanna Shatanionak Cpa, Liubov (Luba) Shilkova, Xiaoyue (Tina) Tan

The Contemporary Tax Journal

No abstract provided.

Digital Taxation - A Virtual Reality, Rachana Khandelwal

The Contemporary Tax Journal

No abstract provided.

More Anti-Simplification: How Pti And Gilti Override The Section 245a Exemption And The U.S. Territorial Tax System, Christine A. Davis

Mercer Law Review

In December of 2017, the United States (U.S.) enacted tax reform commonly known as the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” (TCJA), which was initially thought to “establish[] a territorial tax system for multinational companies.” Over time, however, tax professionals began to understand that the TCJA layered a territorial tax system that exempted foreign earnings from the U.S. income tax (exemption tax system) on top of a residence-based worldwide tax system that used a foreign tax credit (FTC) to protect against juridical double taxation (worldwide tax system). Furthermore, the U.S. exemption tax system is severely limited by the worldwide tax system. …

Constructive Dialogue: Beps And The Tcja, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

US international tax law is commonly conceived as developed in the US and influencing the development of other countries' international tax law. This paper will argue that in the case of the TCJA, the US legislation was heavily influenced by the OECD BEPS project, and that the continuing OECD work in Pillars I and II is likely to have a similar influence on the future development of US international tax law.

How Hard Can This Be? The Dearth Of U.S. Tax Treaties With Latin America, Patricia A. Brown

University of Miami Law Review

The United States has fewer tax treaties with countries in Latin America and the Caribbean than the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain and even China have with such countries. After first describing ways in which tax treaties reduce barriers to cross-border trade and investment, this Article considers in turn various possible explanations for this situation. It examines, and rejects, the hypothesis that Latin American countries are reluctant to enter into tax treaties in general. It then considers, and rejects, the possibility that Latin American countries are opposed to in-creased trade and investment from the United States in particular. It then …

What Can The Oecd Learn From The States?, Richard Pomp

Faculty Articles and Papers

In this article, Professor Pomp argues that the OECD should look to the American states for insight into taxing cross-jurisdictional corporations. In the early 20th century, the states had to respond to the challenge of taxing domestic interstate corporations. While these corporations posed no tax problem at the federal level, states had to respond to the reality of corporations shifting profits into neighboring tax havens. They needed a better alternative to federal transfer pricing and sourcing rules. In the 1930’s, some states began combining domestic related entities.

The growth of multinational corporations created new problems for both the states and …

Delaware's New Competition, William J. Moon

Faculty Scholarship

According to the standard account in American corporate law, states compete to supply corporate law to American corporations, with Delaware dominating the market. This “competition” metaphor in turn informs some of the most important policy debates in American corporate law.

This Article complicates the standard account, introducing foreign nations as emerging lawmakers that compete with American states in the increasingly globalized market for corporate law. In recent decades, entrepreneurial foreign nations in offshore islands have used permissive corporate governance rules and specialized business courts to attract publicly traded American corporations. Aided in part by a select group of private sector …

In Memory Of Professor James E. Bond, Janet Ainsworth

Seattle University Law Review

Janet Ainsworth, Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law: In Memory of Professor James E. Bond.

The Rapidly Evolving Universe Of Us State Taxation Of Cross-Border Online Sales After South Dakota V Wayfair, Inc., And Its Implications For Australian Businesses, Walter Hellerstein

Scholarly Works

The US Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. dramatically expanded the subnational states’ power to require remote suppliers to collect taxes on in-bound sales to local consumers by repudiating the pre-existing, judicially created constitutional rule limiting the states’ authority to enforce such collection obligations to those suppliers with an in-state physical presence and replacing it with a ‘nexus’ rule based on ‘economic and virtual contacts’. The state legislatures reacted quickly and almost unanimously to the Wayfair decision by adopting rules imposing sales tax collection obligations on remote suppliers whose sales exceeded specified dollar or transaction thresholds. …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

How Mobile Homes Correlate With Per Capita Income, Randall K. Johnson

Faculty Works

This study looks at the nature of the relationship between the number of state-regulated mobile homes and per capita income, so as to determine whether higher-income parts of Illinois have more mobile homes than would be predicted by the conventional wisdom. It does so by identifying a simple way to determine the nature of any relationship between mobile homes and per capita income, which the conventional wisdom assumes to be negative, if only at the county level in Illinois. The study, specifically, collects and analyzes mobile home data from Illinois and per capita income data from the U.S. Census. After …

The Dormant Foreign Commerce Clause After Wynne, Michael S. Knoll, Ruth Mason

All Faculty Scholarship

This Essay surveys dormant foreign Commerce Clause doctrine to determine what limits it places on state taxation of international income, including both income earned by foreigners in a U.S. state and income earned by U.S. residents abroad. The dormant Commerce Clause similarly limits states’ powers to tax interstate and foreign commerce; in particular, it forbids states from discriminating against interstate or international commerce. But there are differences between the interstate and foreign commerce contexts, including differences in the nationality of affected taxpayers and differences in the impact of state taxes on federal tax and foreign-relations goals. Given current Supreme Court …

Uniform International Tax Collection And Distribution For Global Development, A Utopian Beps Alternative, Henry Ordower

All Faculty Scholarship

Under the guise of compelling multinational enterprises (MNEs) to pay their fair share of income taxes, the OECD and other multinational agencies have introduced proposals to prevent MNEs from eroding the income tax base of developed economies by continuing to shift income artificially to low or zero tax jurisdictions. Some of the proposals have garnered substantial multinational support, including recent support from the new U.S. presidential administration for a global minimum tax. This Article reviews many of those international proposals. The proposals tend to concentrate the incremental tax revenue from the prevention of base erosion into the treasuries of the …

Treaty Shopping And The New Multilateral Tax Agreement—Is It Business As Usual In Canada?, Catherine Anne Brown, Joseph Bogle

Dalhousie Law Journal

On 1 January 2020 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) Multilateral Convention (MLI) entered into effect for many of Canada’s tax treaties. New provisions introduced by the MLI, specifically the principal purpose test (PPT) and a new preamble, raised concerns that the bar to deny treaty benefits would be substantially lower than the bar previously set by Canada’s General Anti- Avoidance Rule (GAAR). This paper considers how the MLI will impact access to treaty benefits in Canada by applying the new MLI measures to treaty shopping cases previously challenged under the GAAR. The paper concludes that application of …

A Case Study: Effectively Connected Income, Jeffery M. Kadet, David L. Koontz

Articles

In this report, Kadet and Koontz continue their series of articles on various aspects of applying effectively connected income taxation to multinationals by creating an ECI case study using the facts provided in a Hong Kong decision concerning an unidentified multinational that is clearly based in the United States.