Law Commons^™

Achieving Meaningful Civil Tax Penalty Reform And Making It Stick, Jeremiah Coder

Akron Tax Journal

This essay examines the historical use of penalties within the tax code, reviews a number of reports that led to the last round of significant penalty reform legislation, and considers existing problems of penalty administration. Several proposals are outlined to ensure that if and when Congress acts to simplify and revise the penalty regime, the reforms will have lasting impact. Part II covers the growth of penalties in the tax system from its original simple form through its significant expansion to the time that the IRS and Congress worked to cut back the complexity of the civil tax penalty regime …

Rethinking The Role Of The Judicial Step Transaction Principle And A Proposal For Codification, Yoram Keinana

Akron Tax Journal

Thus, as this article will conclude, the role of the step transaction doctrine has been diminishing over the years from a primary weapon against tax shelters into an alternative test. In order to revive its role, the step transaction principle could be codified. As opposed to the controversial proposed codification of the economic substance doctrine, in my view, the codification of the step transaction principle will be more acceptable. The last part of this article sets forth a basic proposal for such codification.

This article will continue as follows. The first part discusses the fundamentals of the general principle of …

The New Tax Shelter Opinion Letter Regulations: Cutting Back On A Client's Ability To Rely On The Advice Of His Counsel, Beckett G. Cantley

Akron Tax Journal

The main question this article will discuss is whether the inability of a client to rely on a client's counsel on such complicated matters as tax shelters is good public policy.

Concerto For Piano Vs. Orchestra: Can Tax And Financial Accounting Harmonize On Hedges?, John J. Ensminger

Akron Tax Journal

The preference for fair value accounting, for marking items to market for financial reporting or tax purposes, has been particularly strong in the last decade, and has become almost doctrine among accounting standards setters as the preferred method of accounting for financial instruments. Though a similar trend can be documented for tax accounting, the longstanding preference for correlating tax liability with realization events continues to prevent consistency. Also preventing consistency are the myriad difficulties in distinguishing capital gain from ordinary income (where embedded derivatives seem to make the result almost arbitrary), those equally subtle difficulties in distinguishing debt from equity …