Law Commons^™

Getting Back To The "Grassroots" Of Tax Administration: Because "We The People" Long For A Gathering Of American Eagles To Restore Trust In The Internal Revenue Service With A Rebuild Irs Initiative, Frank Wolpe

Akron Law Review

Like America, our Internal Revenue Service is a work in progress. Yet, for best results, it’s better to avoid thinking too much about what it is or is not! Instead, let’s think more about what the IRS ought to be! This Article thusly offers a realistic path forward with new choices for a local presence, which once again makes it taxpayer/customer-centric. For more effective tax administration, it also offers a return to something that inexcusably went missing in 1998: senior-executive “on-site oversight” of field operations.

If today’s Internal Revenue Service can be fairly described as an exploding volcano …

The Quagmire Of Mortgage Short Sale Transactions Under Current Homeownership Tax Policy In A Time Of Crisis, Tracie R. Porter

Akron Law Review

The 2007 financial crisis continues to loom over homeowners who own underwater properties. What owning underwater property means for homeowners is that the home’s current market value is less than the mortgage balance, making it impossible to sell or refinance the home without the lender’s approval. The quagmire of financial indebtedness created by current tax laws and policy related to Mortgage Short Sale Transactions, or MSSTs, for homeowners creates an onerous tax liability on taxpayers selling underwater properties. The government and lenders, through various programs implemented to help distressed homeowners with underwater properties, created a belief among homeowners that MSSTs …

Northwestern, O'Bannon And The Future: Cultivating A New Era For Taxing Qualified Scholarships, Kathryn Kisska-Schulze, Adam Epstein

Akron Law Review

On March 26, 2014, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that Northwestern University’s scholarship football players were employees of the institution and could unionize and bargain collectively. From a federal income tax perspective, the significance of the NLRB decision—at that time—was that it could redefine the principle that select student-athletes are no longer unpaid amateurs receiving qualified scholarships, but instead are employees of their institutions, earning scholarship funds in exchange for services rendered as college athletes. Accordingly, a crucial question arising from the NLRB holding was whether the Internal Revenue Service could logically continue to treat qualified scholarships received …