Law Commons^™

Does Federal Spending 'Coerce' States? Evidence From State Budgets, Brian Galle

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

According to a recent plurality of the U.S. Supreme Court, the danger that federal taxes will “crowd out” state revenues justifies aggressive judicial limits on the conditions attached to federal spending. Economic theory offers a number of reasons to believe the opposite: federal revenue increases may also float state boats. To test these competing claims, I examine for the first time the relationship between total federal revenues and state revenues. I find that, contra the NFIB plurality, increases in federal revenue -- controlling, of course, for economic performance and other factors -- are associated with a large and statistically significant …

Fiscal Federalism As Risk-Sharing: The Insurance Role Of Redistributive Taxation, John R. Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In addition to funding government and redistributing income, a redistributive tax-and-transfer system, and a progressive income tax in particular, provides insurance against the risk of uncertain future income. By providing for high taxes for high incomes, and low taxes, exemptions, and transfers for low incomes, a progressive income tax lowers the volatility of potential after-tax income relative to a lump-sum tax. This insurance function is distinct from the redistributive function of the system, since it provides a direct risk-mitigation benefit to the taxpayer himself, rather than simply redistributing income from one taxpayer to another.

This article analyzes the question of …

The Irs Under Siege, Tanina Rostain, Milton C. Regan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This is Chapter 1 of Confidence Games (MIT, 2014).

Confidence Games provides an account of the wave of tax shelters that occurred at the turn of the twenty-first century. During this period, some of America’s most prominent law and accounting firms created and marketed products that enabled the very rich—including newly minted dot-com millionaires—to avoid paying their share of taxes by claiming benefits not recognized by law. These abusive tax shelters bore names like BOSS, BLIPS, and COBRA and were developed by such prestigious firms as KPMG, Ernst & Young, BDO Seidman, the now defunct Jenkens & Gilchrist and Brown …

A Proposed Replacement Of The Tax Expenditure Concept And A Different Perspective On Accelerated Depreciation, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

Over 32 years ago, I published an article on accelerated depreciation in which I concluded that some amount of acceleration was consistent with normal tax principles and should not be classified as a tax expenditure. Over the intervening years, from time to time, I have exchanged comments with authors who have questioned that conclusion. It is time to revisit that topic and renew the consideration of how tax depreciation may properly operate. This Essay’s analysis of depreciation provides one example of how the tax expenditure budgets are flawed. The treatment of some accelerated depreciation as a tax expenditure is based …

Corporate Taxation And Corporate Social Responsibility, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

This Article will address the question of whether publicly traded U.S. corporations owe a duty to their shareholders to minimize their corporate tax burden through any legal means, or if instead, strategic behaviors like aggressive tax-motivated transactions are inconsistent with corporate social responsibility (“CSR”). I believe the latter holds true, regardless of one’s view of the corporation. Under the “artificial entity” view, such behavior undermines the constitutive relationship between the corporation and the state. Under the “real view,” such behavior runs contrary to the normal obligation of citizens to comply with the law (even absent effective enforcement). And under the …

Charitable Giving, Tax Expenditures, And Direct Spending In The United States And The European Union, Lilian V. Faulhaber

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article compares the ways in which the United States and the European Union limit the ability of state-level entities to subsidize their own residents, whether through direct subsidies or through tax expenditures. It uses four recent charitable giving cases decided by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) to illustrate the ECJ’s evolving tax expenditure jurisprudence and argues that, while this jurisprudence may suggest a new and promising model for fiscal federalism, it may also have negative social policy implications. It also points out that the court analyzes direct spending and tax expenditures under different rubrics despite their economic equivalence …

Tax, Command -- Or Nudge?: Evaluating The New Regulation, Brian Galle

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article compares for the first time the relative economic efficiency of “nudges” and other forms of behaviorally-inspired regulation against more common policy alternatives, such as taxes, subsidies, or traditional quantity regulation. Environmental economists and some legal commentators have dismissed nudge-type interventions out of hand for their failure to match the revenues and informational benefits taxes can provide. Similarly, writers in the law and economics tradition argue that fines are generally superior to non-pecuniary punishments.

Drawing on prior work in the choice-of-instruments literature, and contrary to this popular wisdom, I show that nudges may out-perform fines, other Pigouvian taxes, or …

Understanding The Amt, And Its Unadopted Sibling, The Amxt, James R. Hines Jr., Kyle D. Logue

Articles

Four million Americans with extensive tax preferences are subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). By taxing a broad definition of income, the AMT makes it possible to have a tax system that both encourages certain activities with generous tax preferences and maintains a semblance of distributional equity. The same rationale supports the imposition of an Alternative Maximum Tax (AMxT), which would cap tax liabilities of individuals with very few preference items and thereby afford Congress greater flexibility in designing the income tax. The original 1969 AMT proposal included an AMxT; it is difficult to justify imposing one without the …

Tax Advisors And Conflicted Citizens, Milton C. Regan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Thousands of lawyers are involved every day in advising clients outside of litigation. These lawyers counsel clients on how they can benefit from or avoid violating statutes, regulations, and other sources of law. How should we think about the obligations of the lawyer in this setting? This article argues that we should eschew a single prescriptive model of the advisor in favor of a pluralistic conception that bases responsibilities on the salient factors of the context in which the advisor operates.

The model of the advocate that suggests that the lawyer take a relatively aggressive approach to interpreting the legal …

Tax Consequences Of Distributing Equity Compensation Rights In Divorce, Gregg Polsky, Jeffrey D. Fisher, Zachry R. Potter

Scholarly Works

This article discusses the federal tax issues arising from the equitable distribution of compensatory stock options and restricted stock in divorce. While the tax consequences of distributing vested options and shares are clear, the treatment of unvested rights is muddled. This article explains the state of the law and provides practical advice to divorce lawyers who confront these issues.

The Geography Of Marriage, William P. Lapiana

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Improving Hedge Fund Governance, Houman B. Shadab

Articles & Chapters

This article provides a comprehensive analysis of the internal governance of hedge funds. The primary components of hedge fund governance are investors with a high propensity to exercise their short-term redemption rights; managers with high pay performance sensitivity, because they are being compensated with an annual performance-based fee plus earnings from their own investment in the funds they manage; sophisticated investors who demand quality governance; and short-term creditors and derivatives counterparties who provide close monitoring. Hedge fund governance needs the most improvement in the areas of performance reporting (valuation) and the timing of performance-fee calculations. Further, counterintuitively, in some circumstances …

The Problem Of Abusive Related-Partner Allocations, Gregg D. Polsky, Emily Cauble

Scholarly Works

This Article highlights a flaw in the existing rules regarding partnership tax allocations that has not yet received sufficient attention by existing literature. Namely, the partnership tax allocation rules are implicitly premised on the assumption that partners are unrelated and, thus, transact with each other at arm’s length. As a result, related partners can and do devise tax allocation schemes that exploit the gap in the current partnership tax allocation rules to achieve unwarranted tax savings.

This Article proposes to end this abuse by disallowing special allocations among related partners. Under the proposal, allocations among related partners would be required …

The Tax Reform Road Not Taken – Yet, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

The United States has traveled a unique tax policy path, avoiding value added taxes (VATs), which have now been adopted by every OECD country and 160 countries worldwide. Moreover, many U.S. consumption tax advocates have insisted on direct personalized taxes that are unlike taxes used anywhere in the world. This article details a tax reform plan that uses revenues from a VAT to substantially reduce and reform our nation’s tax system. The plan would (1) enact a destination-based VAT; (2) use the revenue produced by this VAT to finance an income tax exemption of $100,000 of family income and to …

Bankruptcy’S Corporate Tax Loophole, Diane Lourdes Dick

Faculty Articles

Imagine you are a company with a failing business that is drowning in debt. On the bright side, you also possess a very valuable asset. This asset is unique because, unlike most assets, if you liquidate the business through a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, it will be extinguished and its value will not be realized by any shareholders or creditors. On the other hand, even if you substantially liquidate the business using Chapter 11, you can, thanks to an extraordinary ambiguity in the law, preserve this valuable asset. Even better, you can direct the value of this asset to your preferred …

The Taxation Of Intellectual Capital, Lily Kahng

Faculty Articles

Intellectual capital-broadly defined to include nonphysical sources of value such as patents and copyrights, computer software, organizational processes, and know-how-has a long history of being undervalued and excluded from measures of economic productivity and wealth. In recent years, however, intellectual capital has finally gained wide recognition as a central driver of economic productivity and growth. Scholars in fields such as knowledge management, financial accounting, and national accounting have produced a wealth of research that significantly advances the conceptual understanding of intellectual capital and introduces new methodologies for identifying and measuring its economic value. This article is the first to analyze …

Tax Issues Facing Clients Of Legal Services, T. Fogg

T. Keith Fogg

This article seeks to highlight tax issues facing clients of legal services. It discusses several specific issues that routinely arise. The article also discusses some of the challenges facing attorneys within legal services that take on a tax clinic and offers some advice on how to address those challenges.

Issues In Tax Avoidance: Comptroller Of Income Tax V Aqq [2014] Sgca 15, Jonathan Chen Yeen Muk

Jonathan Muk

This article explores issues resolved and arising from the Singapore Court of Appeal decision in Comptroller of Income Tax v AQQ [2014] SGCA 15

Taking Administrative Law To Tax, Amandeep S. Grewal

Andy Grewal

Not too long ago, an academic symposium on Taking Administrative Law to Tax would have been just that -- academic. For decades, the tax law sat comfortably isolated from administrative law doctrines that governed other areas of law. Courts frequently applied tax-specific deference standards to IRS guidance, and the tax bar was largely indifferent to the Treasury's many violations of the Administrative Procedure Act. But all that changed when the Supreme Court rejected tax exceptionalism in Mayo v. United States. As the articles in this Symposium show, the Court’s decision has brought great attention to the intersection between tax and …

A Calendar Call Staffing Success Story, T. Keith Fogg

T. Keith Fogg

This short article appeared in 33(2) ABA Section of Taxation NewsQuarterly (Winter 2014), p. 13.

Too Confident: Section 33 Of The Income Tax Act And Its (Mis)Trust In Judicial Precedent, Jonathan Muk

Jonathan Muk

An analysis is presented of Comptroller of Income Tax v. AQQ, in which the Court of Appeal held that a transaction which has a main purpose of tax avoidance will be regarded as tax avoidance, preferred the Australian approach in interpreting Singapore’s anti-avoidance provision and appeared to have lowered the standard of review over the Comptroller. As the Australian approach is itself inconsistently applied, the author asserts that the Court might have been overly confident in its reliance on Australian case law.

The Taxation Of Gratuitous Services Gone Out Of "Control", Allen Madison

Allen Madison

The Futility Of Tax Protester Arguments, Allen Madison

Allen Madison

Quoted In Law360.Com Article On Regulation Of Tax Return Preparers, Robert D. Probasco

Robert Probasco

No abstract provided.

A Tributação Estratégica. Introdução À Teoria Dos Jogos No Direito Tributário., Cristiano Carvalho

Cristiano Rosa de Carvalho

O objetivo deste artigo é introduzir o campo de análise estratégica conhecido como Teoria dos Jogos aos operadores do direito tributário brasileiro.