Law Commons^™

A Market For Tax Compliance, Walter E. Afield Iii

Walter E Afield III

It is becoming increasingly clear that, due to political realities and budgetary constraints, the IRS is going to have to attempt to enforce the tax laws by doing more with less. Current enforcement efforts have yielded a tax gap (i.e., the difference between the amount of taxes that should be paid and the amount that are collected) of roughly $450 billion annually. Faced with this task, one of the steps that the IRS has recently taken is to try to improve the quality in services performed by paid tax preparers, a group that historically has been subject to little IRS …

Present At The Creation: Reflections On The Early Years Of The National Association Of Corporate Directors, Lawrence J. Trautman

Lawrence J. Trautman Sr.

Effective corporate governance is critical to the productive operation of the global economy and preservation of our way of life. Excellent governance execution is also required to achieve economic growth and robust job creation in any country. In the United States, the premier director membership organization is the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD). Now over 36 years old, NACD plays a major role in fostering excellence in corporate governance in the United States and beyond. Over the past thirty-six years NACD has grown from a mere realization of the importance of corporate governance to become the only national membership …

Risky Returns: Accounting For Risk In The Federal Budget, David Kamin

Indiana Law Journal

There has been a growing consensus among academics, analysts, and policymakers that the official federal budget estimates should reflect the “cost of risk”—the amount that the private market would demand to bear risk. The result would be to add tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars in annual costs to the federal budget and, in combination with the budget enforcement laws now in place, make it much more difficult for the federal government to create or expand programs that involve risk—ranging from student lending to home mortgage guarantees to, potentially, broad social insurance programs like unemployment insurance. This Article …

After Ten Years, Sarbanes-Oxley Might Be Statutory Overkill

Harvey Gilmore

The start of the twenty first century brought with it some spectacular corporate accounting scandals: Enron, World-Com, Adelphia, and Tyco, to name a few. The subsequent congressional hearings investigating the accounting and ethical failures of these companies resulted in a parade of one corporate executive after another claiming they had no knowledge of the massive fraud in their firms. In response to this rapid-fire succession of corporate scandals, Congress enacted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (“SOX”). It is a statute first introduced by Senator Paul Sarbanes and Congressman Michael Oxley, and signed into law by President George W. Bush in …

Skating Too Close To The Edge: A Cautionary Tale For Tax Practitioners About The Hazards Of Waiver, Claudine Pease-Wingenter

Claudine Pease-Wingenter

The Federal Rules of Evidence defer to common law in establishing the rules of attorney-client privilege. As a general matter, such an approach creates a fairly uncertain legal landscape as each court articulates the baseline rules somewhat differently. The varied judicial applications of those differing rules can then exacerbate the uncertainty even more.

Unfortunately, in the area of tax law, the rules and their application are particularly uncertain because attorneys and accountants have overlapping responsibilities to clients and the courts have historically refused to recognize an accountant-client privilege. During my approximately eight years practicing corporate tax law, I was acutely …