Law Commons^™

Academic Clinics: Benefitting Students, Taxpayers, And The Tax System, Leslie Book

Leslie Book

This brief article discusses academic tax clinics. The article is part of a project commemorating the 75th anniversary of the American Bar Association Section of Taxation's role in public service. The Tax Section has been a staunch supporter of tax clinics and has nurtured clinicians and clinics since the beginning of tax clinics in the late 1960's and 1970's. In this Article, I will discuss my personal connection to the Tax Section and tax clinics, briefly review the current state of academic tax clinics, and offer some suggestions for the future, including how the Tax Section can continue its leadership …

A Response To Professor Camp: The Importance Of Oversight, Leslie Book

Leslie Book

In past writings and in an upcoming article by Professor Bryan Camp, The Problem of Adversarial Process in the Administrative State, 83 IND. L. J. ### (2008), Professor Camp criticizes the procedural protections Congress added in the tax collection process, noting the limitations of adversary proceedings in the IRS’s tax collection process. In particular, Professor Camp strongly criticizes the collection due process (CDP) rights that were part of the landmark IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998. Given the size of the tax gap, and likely increasing calls for the IRS to do a better job in reducing that tax …

Refund Anticipation Loans And The Tax Gap, Leslie Book

Leslie Book

There has been a significant expansion of refundable credits over the past twenty years. This trend is likely to continue as part of federal policy to stimulate the economy and promote non-tax related social benefits. With the growing use of the tax system to deliver refundable benefits to individuals, the tax preparation industry as a whole has become, in some significant respects, a vehicle for cross-marketing of non-tax goods and services. Refund anticipation loans, or RALs, are one example of these non-tax products that paid preparers facilitate for their customers. RALS are short-term loans secured by a taxpayer's anticipated tax …

Increasing Participation In The Rulemaking Process, Leslie Book

Leslie Book

Agency rulemaking has an immense impact on federal policymaking. The Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) paradigm of notice and comment is meant to provide a mechanism to allow for responsiveness and accountability to unelected agency officials who wield enormous power when promulgating general rules. This article centers on the insufficiency of notice and comment to provide both input to the IRS and legitimacy to the IRS’s actions when guidance touches on issues that are germane to lower income or disadvantaged taxpayers.

In this brief article, I build on administrative and poverty law scholars who have looked at the ways institutional proxies …

Offshore Accounts, Corporate Income Shifting, And Executive Compensation, Leslie Book

Leslie Book

In this essay, Professor Book introduces articles that arose out of the Villanova Law Review Norman J. Shachoy Symposium hosted at Villanova Law School on September 23, 2011. The symposium brought together some of the nation’s leading academics, practitioners, and journalists to discuss issues relating to the taxation of offshore individual offshore accounts and offshore operations of multinational corporations (MNCs), and the role of the tax laws in regulating executive compensation. As I discuss in this introductory essay, the articles at some level implicate essential questions of fairness, including questions of both vertical and horizontal equity. The image of millionaires …

Refund Anticipation And The Tax Gap, Leslie Book

Leslie Book

There has been a significant expansion of refundable credits over the past twenty years. This trend is likely to continue as part of federal policy to stimulate the economy and promote non-tax related social benefits. With the growing use of the tax system to deliver refundable benefits to individuals, the tax preparation industry as a whole has become, in some significant respects, a vehicle for cross-marketing of non-tax goods and services. Refund anticipation loans, or RALs, are one example of these non-tax products that paid preparers facilitate for their customers. RALS are short-term loans secured by a taxpayer's anticipated tax …

Increasing Preparer Responsibility, Visibility And Competence, Leslie Book

Leslie Book

The insights from the responsive regulation literature present an intriguing model for IRS interaction with preparers, and provide a theoretical context for a more nuanced approach that the IRS could adopt when considering its return preparer strategies. To some extent, the IRS's current emphasis on preparer education, including the significant resources expended on tax forums and other general outreach programs, reflects IRS awareness that its interaction with preparers must take a varied approach. In this paper, I propose a more personal contact paradigm with preparers, with those contacts facilitated by heightened identification requirements and a more dedicated IRS effort to …

Freakonomics And The Tax Gap: An Applied Perspective, Leslie Book

Leslie Book

Over the past thirty years, a significant amount of research from a variety of social science disciplines has considered tax compliance. Economists, psychologists, and sociologists have contributed to the discussion, offering research and, at times, conflicting explanations regarding whether a person is likely to comply with his obligation to file an accurate tax return. The unifying theme among this research is a search for explanatory reasons which are the factors that lead to non-compliance. In broad terms, the economic models of tax compliance assume rational behavior, and that people will coldly consider compliance from the perspective as to whether the …