Taxation-Federal Commons^™

Federal Tax Update, Stephen L. Owen

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

With Marriage On The Decline And Cohabitation On The Rise, What About Marital Rights For Unmarried Partners?, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Law & Economics Working Papers

Part I of this paper uses recent government data to trace the decline of marriage and the rise of cohabitation in the United States. Between 2000 and 2010, the population grew by 9.71%, but the husband and wife households only grew by 3.7%, while the unmarried couple households grew by 41.4%. A counter-intuitive finding is that the early 21st century data show little correlation between the marriage rate and economic conditions. Because of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), same-sex marriage is now universally available to same-sex couples. Part I considers the impact of same-sex marriage on …

Becker V. Becker, 131 Nev. Adv. Op. 85 (Oct. 29, 2015), Paul George

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

In response to a certified question by the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Nevada, the Court concluded that under NRS 21.090(1)(bb) a debtor can exempt his stock in the corporations described in NRS 78.746(2), but his economic interest in that stock is still subject to the charging order remedy in NRS 78.746(1).

Silent Tax Changes: The Political Economy Of Indexing For Inflation, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

The federal income tax adjusts many but not all of its dollar components automatically to account for inflation. In this article I analyze the benefits and burdens this process confers on some taxpayers and the political logic behind them. I discuss the choice of the proper index for making the adjustments, as well as the effects of the failure to adjust specific dollar amounts. I conclude that some adjustments have become overly generous, while unadjusted provisions suffer slow repeal, sometimes intentionally. Indexation thus can have the effect of tax legislation by stealth.

How Would The Supreme Court Rule On Loving And Ridgely?, Steve R. Johnson

Scholarly Publications

On March 3 the Supreme Court unanimously decided Direct Marketing Association v. Brohl, a case arising under the Tax Injunction Act {TIA). The focus of this article is not on Brohl on its own terms but on the implications of Brohl· for the Loving line of cases and for future cases that may arise out of Loving. I believe Brohl reveals that the Supreme Court would likely uphold the approach taken in Loving were a case of this kind to reach the Court. For that reason, the government was wise not to seek Supreme Court review of Loving. Unless it …

The Agency Exception To The Anticipatory Assignment Doctrine, Jeffrey H. Kahn, Douglas A. Kahn

Scholarly Publications

In this article, the authors discuss the agency exception to the anticipatory assignment of income doctrine and explain the policy justification for the exception.

How Far Does Circular 230 Exceed Treasury’S Statutory Authority?, Steve R. Johnson

Scholarly Publications

Treasury regulations defining the duties of those practicing before the IRS, commonly called Circular 230, are a cornerstone of federal tax practice. Recent judicial decisions, however, raise the genuine possibility that substantial portions of Circular 230 may be invalidated if challenged.

This possibility began to be taken seriously as a result of the 2013 opinion in Loving v. IRS, the 2014 affirmation of that judgment, and the government’s decision not to seek en banc or Supreme Court review. The concerns intensified with the July 2014 decision in Ridgely v. Lew. They may intensify further – or be deflated – by …

Citizens United And Taxable Entities: Will Taxable Entities Be The New Stealth Dark Money Campaign Organizations?, Donald B. Tobin

Faculty Scholarship

The electoral process in the United States is going through a major transition as money increasingly pours into non-candidate independent groups (“IGs”). Before 2000, IGs could engage in significant electoral advocacy without having to disclose the IG’s donors or its expenditures. Congress sought to address the lack of disclosure by requiring section 527 political organizations to disclose their contributions and expenditures. IGs quickly sought an alternative organizational form for engaging in political advocacy. The alternative organizational form of choice has been the tax-exempt section 501(c)(4) social welfare organization.

In a 2007 article, I explored whether such tax-exempt entities would be …

Standing Issues In Tax Litigation, Steve R. Johnson

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

The Rise And Fall Of Chevron In Tax: From The Early Days To King And Beyond, Steve R. Johnson

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Professors Do Not Provide Childs Support, Gregg D. Polsky, Brant J. Hellwig

Scholarly Articles

In "Structuring Legal Fees Without Annuities: Offspring of Childs," Tax Notes, July 20, 2015, p. 341 , Robert W. Wood argues that Childs v. Commissioner, 103 T.C. 634 (1994), provides tremendous investment flexibility for plaintiffs' lawyers who choose to invest their contingent fees in tax-favored structured attorney fee products. Likewise, Gerald Nowotny has recently noted that the Childs case allows those lawyers to invest their contingent fees in private placement variable annuities.

We agree with Wood and Nowotny. In fact, the reasoning of Childs would allow any taxpayer in any industry to use similar vehicles to invest items of …

Dodging The Taxman: Why The Treasury’S Anti-Abuse Regulation Is Unconstitutional, Linda D. Jellum

Articles

To combat abusive tax shelters, the Department of the Treasury promulgated a general anti-abuse regulation applicable to all of subchapter K of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. The Treasury targeted subchapter K because unique aspects of the partnership tax laws—including its aggregate-entity dichotomy—foster creative tax manipulation. In the anti-abuse regulation, the Treasury attempted to “codify” existing judicially- created anti-abuse doctrines, such as the business-purpose and economic-substance doctrines. Also, and more surprisingly, the Treasury directed those applying subchapter K to use a purposivist approach to interpretation and to reject textualism. In this article, I demonstrate that the Treasury exceeded both …

Corporate Inversions And The Unbundling Of Regulatory Competition, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Several prominent public corporations have recently embraced a noteworthy (and newsworthy) type of transaction known as a "tax inversion." In a typical inversion, a U.S. multinational corporation ("MNC") merges with a foreign company. The entity that ultimately emerges from this transactional cocoon is invariably incorporated abroad, yet typically remains listed in U.S. securities markets under the erstwhile domestic issuer's name. When structured to satisfy applicable tax requirements, corporate inversions permit domestic MNCs eventually to replace U.S. with foreign tax treatment of their extraterritorial earnings – ostensibly at far lower effective rates.

Most regulators and politicians have reacted to the inversion …

Book Review. Reviving Fiscal Citizenship, Ajay K. Mehrotra

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In recent years, numerous lawmakers, policy analysts, and scholars have been decrying the many defects of the present U.S. income tax system. Few have attempted to defend our return-based mass income tax. This essay reviews Learning to Love Form 1040, Lawrence Zelenak’s stirring and persuasive defense of a simplified version of our present federal income tax system. In contrast to the conventional economic critiques, Zelenak explores the underappreciated social, cultural, and political benefits of a return-based, mass income tax. Chief among these, he argues, is the existing regime’s potential to raise the tax consciousness of the average citizen and to …

Taxing The Unheavenly Chorus: Why Section 501(C)(6) Trade Associations Are Undeserving Of Tax Exemption, Philip Hackney

Articles

Our federal, state, and local governments provide a subsidy that enhances the political voice of business interests. This article discusses the federal subsidy for business interests provided through the Internal Revenue Code (“Code”) and argues why we should end that subsidy. Under the same section that provides exemption from income tax for charitable organizations, the Code also exempts nonprofit organizations classified as “business leagues, chambers of commerce, real-estate boards, boards of trade, or professional football leagues.” Theory supporting tax exemption states that we should subsidize nonprofit organizations that provide goods or services that are undersupplied by the market. A charitable …

Cancellation Of Debt And Related Transactions, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn

Articles

If a taxpayer borrows money, the borrowed funds are not included in the taxpayer's gross income. That treatment is proper even though the taxpayer has increased his assets by the amount he borrowed because he also has created a corresponding liability to pay back the loan. The taxpayer's net: wealth has not increased. 'The more difficult and interesting questions arise when the taxpayer fails to repay the loan. At first blush, it would appear that upon cancellation of a loan, the taxpayer should have income for the amount that was cancelled. However, the current tax treatment is not that simple. …

Controversies In Tax Law: A Matter Of Perspective (Introduction), Anthony C. Infanti

Book Chapters

This volume presents a new approach to today’s tax controversies, reflecting that debates about taxation often turn on the differing worldviews of the debate participants. For instance, a central tension in the academic tax literature — which is filtering into everyday discussions of tax law — exists between “mainstream” and “critical” tax theorists. This tension results from a clash of perspectives: Is taxation primarily a matter of social science or social justice? Should tax policy debates be grounded in economics or in critical race, feminist, queer, and other outsider perspectives?

To capture and interrogate what often seems like a chasm …

A Simpler Verifiable Gift Tax, Wendy G. Gerzog

All Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this article is to propose a simpler verifiable gift tax, to reassert basic principles of transfer taxes, to encourage simple, outright gifts, and to eliminate some of the major abuses in the current gift tax regime. To accomplish these goals, the proposed tax would simplify gift completion rules, adopt a hard-to-complete rule of transfer taxation, reduce the annual exclusion while expanding the consumption exclusion, and employ loss of preference inducements to increase gift tax compliance.

The Estate Planner's Income Tax Playbook, Samuel A. Donaldson

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Victims Of Our Own Success: The Perils Of Obergefell And Windsor, Anthony C. Infanti

Articles

This short essay was spurred by the numerous celebrations of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Obergefell v. Hodges legalizing same-sex marriage in all fifty states. Though the essay acknowledges the importance of both Obergefell and the Supreme Court’s earlier decision in United States v. Windsor, it highlights the significant perils that these decisions entail for the LGBT community. In the essay, I use tax as a lens for describing some of the lesser-known perils associated with these decisions in the hopes of making those perils more concrete and easily understood by a wide audience of (tax and nontax) …

Airbnb And The Housing Segment Of The Modern Sharing Economy: Are Short-Term Rental Restrictions An Unconstitutional Taking, Jamila Jefferson-Jones

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

The Case For Taxing (All Of) Labor Income, Consumption, Capital Income, And Wealth, David Gamage

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Perhaps the most fundamental questions in tax legal scholarship concern debates about what should be the ideal tax base or tax bases. In particular, scholars have vigorously disagreed about (1) whether the United States should follow other developed countries in supplementing its income tax with a value-added consumption tax, and (2) whether governments should seek to tax capital income and wealth or should instead seek to redesign or replace income taxes with progressive consumption taxes.

The prior economics-oriented theoretical literature on these questions has largely focused on analyzing labor supply and savings behaviors. Yet the existing empirical literature does not …

For Better And Worse: The Differing Income Tax Treatments Of Marriage At Different Income Levels, Lawrence A. Zelenak

Faculty Scholarship

Although both marriage penalties and marriage bonuses exist at all income levels under the federal income tax, the system is tilted toward penalties for lower-income couples, toward bonuses for middle-income couples, and back toward penalties for upper income couples. This Article begins by explaining how the tax rules produce these differing treatments of marriage at different points in the income distribution. It then argues that the increase in recent decades in the social acceptability and prevalence of cohabitation makes tax marriage effects a more serious concern--in terms of both behavioral, effects and fairness-than in earlier decades. After demonstrating that Congress …

The Charitable Contributions Deduction: Federal Tax Rules, Roger Colinvaux, Harvey P. Dale

Scholarly Articles

This article provides a succinct overview of the main federal income tax law rules affecting charitable contributions. his Article covers all principal topics, including: eligibility to receive deductible contributions, eligible gifts, the amount allowed as a deduction, the specific rules for gifts of non-cash property, contributions to certain split-interest trusts, substantiation rules, and valuation. his Article also touches on the estate and gift tax charitable deduction and provides a survey of select policy issues, including the rationale and form of the tax benefit, concerns about efficiency, the ability to deduct the appreciation in value of property, a non-itemizer deduction, and …

Overtaxing The Working Family: Uncle Sam And The Childcare Squeeze, Shannon Weeks Mccormack

Articles

Today, many working parents are caught in a “childcare squeeze”: While they require two incomes just to make ends meet, they end up spending a strikingly large percentage of their income on childcare so that they can work away from the home. Worse still, some parents find themselves “squeezed out” of the market entirely, unable to earn the additional income their family requires because they cannot find jobs that pay enough to offset soaring childcare expenses. This Article argues that the tax laws have played an important role in aggravating these hardships. Currently, the Internal Revenue Code treats the childcare …