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Full-Text Articles in Tax Law
Independent Contractors In Law And In Fact: Evidence From U.S. Tax Returns, Eleanor Wilking
Independent Contractors In Law And In Fact: Evidence From U.S. Tax Returns, Eleanor Wilking
Northwestern University Law Review
Federal tax law divides workers into two categories depending on the degree of control exercised over them by the service purchaser (i.e., the firm): employees, who are subject to direct supervision; and independent contractors, who operate autonomously. Such worker classification determines the administration of income tax and what it subsidizes, as well as which nontax regulations pertain, such as workplace safety and antidiscrimination protections. The Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies have codified common law agency doctrine into multifactor balancing tests used to legally distinguish employees from independent contractors. These tests have proved challenging to apply and costly to …
The Missing U.S. Vat: Economic Inequality, American Fiscal Exceptionalism, And The Historical U.S. Resistance To National Consumption Taxes, Ajay K. Mehrotra
The Missing U.S. Vat: Economic Inequality, American Fiscal Exceptionalism, And The Historical U.S. Resistance To National Consumption Taxes, Ajay K. Mehrotra
Northwestern University Law Review
Since the 1970s, economic inequality has soared dramatically across the globe and particularly in the United States. In that time, one of the obstacles of using fiscal policy to address inequality has been the growing myth of the “overtaxed American”—the misguided notion that U.S. taxpayers pay more in taxes than residents of other advanced, industrialized countries. This myth has persisted, in part, because of the peculiar and distinctive nature of the fractured American fiscal and social welfare state. Even a cursory review of comparative tax data shows that the United States, by most measures, is a low-tax country compared to …