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Examining The Tax Advantage Of Founders' Stock, Gregg D. Polsky, Brant J. Hellwig May 2012

Examining The Tax Advantage Of Founders' Stock, Gregg D. Polsky, Brant J. Hellwig

Scholarly Works

Recent commentary has described founders' stock as tax-advantaged because it converts founders' compensation income into capital gains. In this paper we describe various founders' stock strategies that offer this character conversion and then analyze whether they are, on the whole, tax advantageous. While the founders' stockstrategies favorably convert the character of the founders' income, they simultaneously turn the company's compensation deductions into non-deductions. Whetherfounders' stock is tax-advantaged overall depends on whether the benefit of the founders' character conversion outweighs the cost of the company's lost deductions. We use various hypothetical to illustrate this tradeoff. We conclude that founders' stock is …


Federal - State Tax Coordination: What Congress Should Or Should Not Do -- Testimony Of Walter Hellerstein On Tax Reform: What It Means For State And Local Tax And Fiscal Policy, Before The Committee On Finance, Walter Hellerstein Apr 2012

Federal - State Tax Coordination: What Congress Should Or Should Not Do -- Testimony Of Walter Hellerstein On Tax Reform: What It Means For State And Local Tax And Fiscal Policy, Before The Committee On Finance, Walter Hellerstein

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Testimony of Walter Hellerstein, Francis Shackelford Professor of Taxation Distinguished Research Professor, before the Committee on Finance, hearing on Tax Reform: What It Means for State and Local Tax and Fiscal Policy, United States Senate, April 25, 2012.


Rationally Cutting Tax Expenditures, Gregg D, Polsky Jan 2012

Rationally Cutting Tax Expenditures, Gregg D, Polsky

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This article illustrates the differences between the two types of tax expenditures by examining the child tax credit (a distributional expenditure), the charitable deduction (an allocative expenditure), and taxfree saving accounts and the mortgage deduction (both of which are-usually defended on allocative grounds but probably have mainly distributional impacts). These differences should be well understood by policymakers as they consider tax expenditure reform as part of a deficit reduction plan.


Fixing Section 409a: Legislative And Administrative Options, Gregg D. Polsky Jan 2012

Fixing Section 409a: Legislative And Administrative Options, Gregg D. Polsky

Scholarly Works

This symposium contribution to the Villanova Law Review describes the legislative calamity that is section 409A of the Internal Revenue Code. Section 409A manages, all at once, to (i) fail to better neutralize the tax treatment of deferred compensation with that of current compensation, (ii) impose significant compliance costs on sophisticated taxpayers, and (iii) provide a dangerous trap for unsophisticated taxpayers.

Ideally, Congress should repeal section 409A and replace it with a system that taxes deferred compensation more neutrally vis-a-vis current compensation. Failing that, Congress should either replace section 409A with a broad grant of authority to the Treasury and …