Law Commons^™

The Business Purpose Doctrine In Corporate Divisions, Stephen Rigsby

Akron Law Review

The corporate division, however, lends itself to schemes for avoidance of tax. These schemes are attempts to convert ordinary income into income taxable at capital gains rates. An elaborate statutory mechanism has been created to prevent this conversion. In addition, the courts have created judicial doctrines which sometimes work by adding to the statutory framework and sometimes overlap. The resulting confusion of statute and judicial doctrine is the subject of this article. The investigation will focus on that part of the statute known as the device clause and its interaction with the judicial doctrines which together are known as the …

Search: A Computer Program For Legal Problem Solving, Robert Hellawell

Akron Law Review

This article describes a computer program called SEARCH which is designed to assist a lawyer in legal analysis. SEARCH deals with a single subject in corporate taxation, but its approach can be used for a variety of legal problems. SEARCH's subject is the attribution rules of section 318 of the Internal Revenue Code (hereinafter Code). These rules, heartily disliked by many, are seemingly complex and often both difficult and time consuming to apply. Essentially, the attribution rules provide that a taxpayer, in certain cases, will be considered to own corporate shares that he does not actually own. Such shares are …

Constructive Dividend Doctrine From An Integrationist Perspective, Anthony P. Polito

Akron Tax Journal

A long standing feature of U.S. corporate taxation is a group of doctrinal devices serving to prevent taxpayer attempts to avoid double taxation of corporate earnings. This Article refers to these devices collectively as the constructive dividend doctrine (hereinafter “CDD”) and analyzes the extent to which the CDD ought to be set aside as counterproductive.

This analysis is grounded in contrasting views of the normative tax treatment of corporate enterprise. On the one hand is the perspective in which the double income taxation of corporate income is normative (the “Double Tax Perspective”). The Double Tax Perspective calls for taxation of …

Failing Corporate Tax Transparency And The Immediate Need To Reduce Overburdening Duplicative Tax Reporting Requirements, Ilya A. Lipin

Akron Tax Journal

The benefits to corporate taxpayers from the continuing additions to disclosure requirements have not been obvious. Despite expenditures by corporate taxpayers on compliance, there is evidence that the Service has not been using all of the information it receives from additional disclosure forms.28 Duplicative disclosures of the same or similar tax information that lead to additional costs are of immediate concern to the corporate taxpayer.29 The estimated corporate taxpayers’ compliance tax burden is summarized in Appendix 1. Part II of this article describes in detail key existing reporting requirements such as reportable transaction disclosure statement and Form 8886, disclosure statements …

Deconstructing The Rules Of Corporate Tax, Rachelle Y. Holmes

Akron Tax Journal

While academics, practitioners, and the White House have proposed any number of reform measures to deal with the problems plaguing the U.S. corporate tax regime, their solutions involve varying structural and statutory changes, which are in fact extrinsic to the form of the underlying rules themselves. In contrast, this Article argues for an innate form of change to the U.S. corporate tax rules, which would fundamentally affect the way in which tax lawmakers actually draft tax rules and regulations. In particular, it argues that a systemic focus and commitment by lawmakers to a more principles-based approach to regulation would significantly …

Challenging The Treasury: United Dominion Industries, Inc. V. United States, Christina I. Smith

Akron Tax Journal

This note will try to make some sense of the United Dominion case and its implications on PLLs/SLLs in the consolidated corporate tax arena by analyzing some of the more difficult questions about PLLs/SLLs.

Part II explores the background and application of both carrybacks, generally, and PLL/SLL carrybacks, specifically, as well as the two prominent cases in the PLL/SLL controversy prior to United Dominion -- Intermet Corp. v. Commissioner (hereinafter "Intermet") and United Dominion Indus. Inc. v. United States (hereinafter "United Dominion"). Part III looks at United Dominion specifically, including a statement of the facts, procedural history, and reasoning of …

The Return To Corporate Tax Evasion In The Presence Of An Income Tax On Shareholders, Graeme S. Cooper

Akron Tax Journal

The paper will proceed in the following stages: Section II will describe a theoretical model of the incentive structure surrounding corporate tax evasion and the implications that the model suggests for the behavior of corporate managers. Section III will analyze how the personal income tax might change the returns to evasion and how this effect could be expected to influence the behaviour of the corporation's managers. Section IV will describe the principal interaction mechanisms between the corporate tax and personal income tax employed in practice. Section V will analyze the effects of each of the interaction mechanisms described. Section VI …

Tax Equity And Fiscal Responsibility Act Of 1982, Merlin G. Briner

Akron Tax Journal

O N AUGUST 20, 1982, President Reagan signed into law the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA), the fourth piece of major tax legislation in less than seven years. Though TEFRA has been said to provide the single largest tax increase in American history, President Reagan lobbied for it not as a tax bill, but as a revenue measure which, to his mind, in no way represented a backing-off from his vaunted "supply side-trickle down" economic program. This article will discuss the implications of TERFA on both the individual taxpayer and businesses.