Law Commons^™

A Tax Response To The Executive Pay Problem, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

Many observers believe that that the public company executive labor market is deficient and results in systematically excessive compensation. This Article accepts that premise and considers potential regulatory responses. Specifically, this Article proposes and analyzes a two-pronged tax response to the problem of excessive executive pay – the imposition of a surtax on executive pay in excess of a threshold combined with investor tax relief. These two prongs respond to the chief concerns raised by excessive executive pay. The imposition of a surtax would reduce the after-tax income of executives, which would directly address the unfairness of excessive pay and …

An Industry-Specific Vat In Michigan - Objective Valuation In The Retail Gasoline Trade, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

New York adopted an industry-specific value added tax (VAT) to solve problems with virtual intermediaries (room remarketers) under its hotel accommodations tax. The New York VAT resembles the VAT used in the European Union (EU). It is a credit-invoice VAT that subjectively values supplies.

Michigan has also adopted an industry-specific credit-invoice VAT, however the targeted industry is the retail gasoline trade. The valuation method is objective, rather than subjective. In valuing supplies objectively rather than subjectively, the Michigan VAT resembles the exception provisions that are found in most VATs around the globe. Objective valuations are used in VATs when dealing …

Technology Solves Mtic - Vln, Rtvat, D-Vat Certification, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

Technology solves missing trader intra-community (MTIC) fraud. This should come as no surprise. MTIC is technology-intensive fraud – its solution should also be technology-intensive.

MTIC is getting to be an out-dated term. Now that missing trader fraud has move into services it is no longer confined to intra-community trade, and the older acronym should be adjusted to MTIC/MTEC fraud (with MTEC standing for missing trader extra-community).

MTIC/MTEC fraud is fully digitized (the supply, the movement of the supply, and the funding). The consequences should be clear. MTIC/MTEC must be prevented (before the fact), not pursued (after the fact). In the …

Transfer Pricing & Business Restructurings: Intangibles, Synergies, And Shelters, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Andrew Shact

Faculty Scholarship

Transfer pricing in business restructuring is attracting global attention. In the past two years two key policy-making groups have released three substantive documents on this topic. The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) issued two position statements while the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) issued one. While restructurings are a very common commercial practice, until recently it has been uncommon to apply transfer pricing criteria when examining them in detail.

Essentially, the OECD has overlooked that a unique and valuable intangible is created during the restructuring process. By not acknowledging that this intangible in the mix, the OECD fails …

New York Adopts A Vat, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

On August 13, 2010 the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, Office of Tax Policy Analysis, Taxpayer Guidance Division released Amendments Affecting the Application of Sales Tax to Rent Received for Hotel Occupancy by Room Remarketers. The legislative revision it considers (Chapter 57 of the Laws of 2010) was effective September 1, 2010. The changes brought in by this Chapter effectively converted New York’s Hotel Room Occupancy Tax from a single-stage retail sales tax to multi-stage European-style VAT. This paper considers the New York VAT in hotel accommodations in three sections. The first defines a European-style credit-invoice VAT …

Brown Shoe Versus The Horizontal Merger Guidelines, Keith N. Hylton

Faculty Scholarship

The new Horizontal Merger Guidelines, if treated by courts as a source of law, would reduce the discretion traditionally exercised by courts in defining relevant markets and market power in merger cases. This is an undesirable shift in the balance of power because courts have used the market power inquiry stage of merger analysis as a general checkpoint or weigh station for evaluating factors relevant to the welfare effects of a merger.

Will Cutting The Payroll Tax Increase Jobs? (Empirical Evidence From The Eu Vat), Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

Red Ink Rising, the Peterson–Pew Commission on Budget Reform’s report presents the country with a fiscal/employment dilemma – Congress must act immediately to stem the federal debt, but it must move carefully lest it harm employment in the fragile economy. In short, we must act fast and slow – we must decrease the debt and increase employment. This is a difficult task.

The Peterson-Pew dilemma (notably its jobs-creation aspect) was taken to heart by both of the reform commissions that issued reports soon thereafter (National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, The Moment of Truth and The Debt Reduction Task …

Vat Fraud: Mtic & Mtec - The Tradable Services Problem, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

Tradable services – VoIP termination services, mobile minutes, software as a service (SaaS), or almost any service bought or sold in the “cloud” – are a distinct class of taxable supplies. These service-based supplies both resemble and differ fundamentally from goods. They also differ from services that are consumed-on-purchase (consumed services).

Tradable services are designed from the beginning for re-sale. They are hybrid supplies that behave commercially like goods, but have functional attributes that make them hard to distinguish from services generally. When determining the place of supply/ place of taxation for these kinds of supplies, their hybrid character presents …

Upper-Level Courses: Three Examplars, Mark Fagan, Tamar Frankel, Eric J. Gouvin, Kathy Z. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

I'm Mark Fagan, and I co-teach a course on securitization with Tamar Frankel at Boston University School of Law. We have come together to teach several interdisciplinary courses that combine law, business and public policy. Our course on securitization is a wonderful exemplar because it touches so many aspects of law as well as business and public policy.

We spent quite a bit of time wrestling with how to teach it. Do you teach it in a process fashion? Do you teach it by legal topic? Do you take examples and examine them? After much debate and discussion, we actually …