Accounting Law Commons^™

United States National Report On Tax Privacy, Joshua D. Blank

New York University Law and Economics Working Papers

This National Report was prepared for a conference titled Tax Secrecy and Tax Transparency – The Relevance of Confidentiality in Tax Law, which took place in July 2012 in Rust, Austria and was co-hosted by the Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and by Örebro University, Sweden. The Report describes the current tax privacy protections that apply to taxpayers in the United States and provides an overview of the policy considerations that have contributed to their enactment. Portions of this Report were originally published, in part, in Joshua D. Blank, In Defense ...

The Taxation Of Cloud Computing And Digital Content, David Shakow

Faculty Scholarship

“Cloud computing” raises important and difficult questions in state tax law, and for Federal taxes, particularly in the foreign tax area. As cloud computing solutions are adopted by businesses, items we view as tangible are transformed into digital products. In this article, I will describe the problems cloud computing poses for tax systems. I will show how current law is applied to cloud computing and will identify the difficulties current approaches face as they are applied to this developing technology.

My primary interest is how Federal tax law applies to cloud computing, particularly as the new technology affects international transactions ...

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 ...

Strengthening Financial Reporting: An Essay On Expanding The Auditor’S Opinion Letter, James D. Cox

Faculty Scholarship

Users of financial statements, foremost of which are investors, have a voracious appetite for information that better enables them to assess the financial position and performance of the reporting firm. Even though financial statements purport to address their needs, because the statements, which are prepared by the firm’s managers, conceal a range of managerial estimates, assumptions, judgments, and choices, investors are deprived of the most fundamental kernel of information they seek, namely the overall quality of the financial reports themselves. In this Article, the author sets forth several modest steps that would enhance the overall quality of financial reporting ...

Pitfalls In Brazilian Bankruptcy Law For International Bond Investors, Jeffrey M. Anapolsky, Jessica F. Woods

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Building The House On A Weak Foundation: Edenfield V. Fane And The Current State Of The Commercial Speech Doctrine, Dennis William Bishop

Pepperdine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Improving Charitable Accountability , James J. Fishman

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Responsible Profitability - Not On My Balance Sheet, 61 Cath. U. L. Rev. 651 (2012), Arthur Acevedo

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Capital Market Consequences Of Filing Late 10-Qs And 10-Ks, Eli Bartov, Mark L. Defond, Yaniv Konchitchki

New York University Law and Economics Working Papers

Timely disclosure of financial information is critical for well functioning capital markets, and a recent surge in late SEC filings has led to increased interest in their consequences. We find that the market reacts negatively to announcements of late filings, even to potentially benign announcements that indicate management intends to file within the SEC’s allowed grace period. We also find that the reaction is more negative for late 10-Qs than late 10-Ks when accounting reasons are cited for the delay and that the market anticipates which late 10-Q filers will subsequently fail to file within the SEC’s allowed ...

The Puzzle Of Short-Termism, Kent Greenfield

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

From the Introduction: When pondering the question of the “sustainable corporation,” as we did in this symposium, one of the intractable problems is the nature of the corporation to produce externalities. By noting this characteristic, I am not making a moral point but an economic one. The nature of the firm is to create financial wealth by producing goods and services for profit; without regulatory or contractual limits, the firm has every incentive to externalize costs onto those whose interests are not included in the firm’s current financial calculus. In fact, because of the corporation’s tendency to create ...

Intermediaries Revisited: Is Efficient Certification Consistent With Profit Maximization?, Jonathan M. Barnett

University of Southern California Law and Economics Working Paper Series

Private certification mechanisms are a key component of the regulatory infrastructure in the financial sector and other commercial settings. It is generally assumed that certification intermediaries have profit-based incentives to deliver accurate information to the certified market. But this view does not account for repeated failures in certification markets. Those failures can be explained by an inherent defect in the incentive structure of certification intermediaries: entry barriers both support and undermine the consistent supply of accurate information to the certified market. Certification markets tend to converge on a handful of providers protected by switching costs, product opacity and reputational noise ...

United States V. Textron: The Right Answer To A Billion-Dollar Question, Ned Hillenbrand

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Competing For The Next Hundred Million Americans: The Uses And Abuses Of Tax Increment Financing, George Lefcoe

University of Southern California Law and Economics Working Paper Series

Demographers predict that the US population will grow by one hundred million in 2050. Newcomers will settle in suburbia, particularly to the fast growing big cities of the south and west, cities in the resurgent heartland of the country, exurbia and ‘ superstar cities.’

Communities eager to appeal to these newcomers will use tax increment financing for public improvements such as stadiums, museums, plazas and promenades. These public improvements are often integrated into signature private redevelopment projects carefully designed to achieve environmental and planning objectives by being pedestrian-friendly, high density, and mixed use, accessible not only by automobile but public transit ...

Corporate Criminal Liability: Theory And Evidence, Jennifer Arlen

New York University Law and Economics Working Papers

This Chapter examines the existing structure of corporate criminal liability, providing empirical evidence on the types of firms convicted and the magnitude and nature of the sanctions imposed. It then examines whether existing U.S. enforcement practice is consistent with optimal corporate liability, especially for firms where ownership is separated from day-to-day control. The first part of this analysis determines the optimal structure of corporate liability. It shows that optimal corporate liability has different purposes, and thus a different structure, from individual criminal liability (Becker, 1968) whenever the optimal deterrence requires expenditures to detect and investigate corporate wrongdoing. This chapter ...

Credit Default Swaps And Clearing, Nazanin Baseri

Legislation and Policy Brief

In an article from 2000, an investigative journalist from The Banker warned against the hidden dangers of credit default swaps (CDS). Although CDSs can be a useful financial instrument for the banking industry, the article warned of the anonymity of credit derivatives, lack of transparency, and the potential for disaster. In an unfortunately accurate conclusion, the journalist opined that a crisis might occur because banks may not put in place the proper risk control systems in time to avert a disaster. Fast forward eight years and the financial meltdown of 2008 developed into one of the largest economic disasters in ...

Leverage, Sanctions, And Deterrence Of Accounting Fraud, Urska Velikonja

Faculty Scholarship

The empirical evidence suggests that firms overpay for fraud liability and overspend on internal compliance mechanisms (which are not very effective at preventing fraud). Yet, insiders who commit fraud are rarely sanctioned for their wrongdoing, which produces moral hazard and individual underdeterrence.
Two factors explain the failure to sanction managers who commit fraud. First, managers control the information revealing who was involved in account fraud and, thus, can impede external investigations and sanctions. Second, managers also influence whether the firm will investigate and sanction accounting fraud internally. Managers’ control over settlement and the availability of directors’ and officers’ insurance further ...

The New Governance And The Tools Of Public Action: An Introduction, Lester M. Salamon

Fordham Urban Law Journal

A fundamental re-thinking is currently underway throughout the world about how to cope with public problems. Stimulated by popular frustrations with the cost and effectiveness of government programs and by a new-found faith in liberal economic theories, serious questions are being raised about the capabilities, and even the motivations, of public-sector institutions. This type of questioning has spread beyond American political discourse to other parts of the world. Underlying much of this reform surge is a set of theories that portrays government agencies as tightly structured hierarchies insulated from market forces and from effective citizen pressure and therefore free to ...

Inside-Out Corporate Governance, David A. Skeel Jr., Vijit Chahar, Alexander Clark, Mia Howard, Bijun Huang, Federico Lasconi, A.G. Leventhal, Matthew Makover, Randi Milgrim, David Payne, Romy Rahme, Nikki Sachdeva, Zachary Scott

Faculty Scholarship

Until late in the twentieth century, internal corporate governance—that is, decision making by the principal constituencies of the firm—was clearly distinct from outside oversight by regulators, auditors and credit rating agencies, and markets. With the 1980s takeover wave and hedge funds’ and equity funds’ more recent involvement in corporate governance, the distinction between inside and outside governance has eroded. The tools of inside governance are now routinely employed by governance outsiders, intertwining the two traditional modes of governance. We argue in this Article that the shift has created a new governance paradigm, which we call inside-out corporate governance ...

Did Sarbanes-Oxley Lead To Better Financial Reporting?, Dennis Chambers, Dana R. Hermanson, Jeff L. Payne

Faculty Publications

The article describes and summarizes five studies that examined whether the landmark Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) was beneficial or not to financial reporting. The U.S. Congress is stated to have passed the legislation on July 25, 2002 in reaction to a series of financial accounting scandals involving such companies as Enron and WorldCom, as well as the demise of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP. The author asserts that all five of the studies provide evidence of a significant improvement in the financial reporting environment since SOX.

Newly Registered Securities And Accountants' Liability To Third Party Investors Under The Federal Securities Law, Timothy J. Murphy

Golden Gate University Law Review

No abstract provided.