Tax Law Commons^™

Reinventing The Wheel: What We Can Learn From The Tax Reform Act Of 1986, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In 2010, when former Senate Finance Committee Chair Max Baucus was beginning his push toward tax reform, he held a hearing featuring veterans of the great tax reform of 1986. The main conclusion from this hearing was that Congress has changed too much since then to make a repeat of 1986 likely. We are now five years later, Baucus is the U.S.ambassador to China, and no tax reform has happened yet, thus confirming what the veterans told the chair in 2010.

All Or Nothing? The Obama Budget Proposals And Beps, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

There is a wide bipartisan consensus that the U.S. international tax regime is broken. We have the highest corporate tax in the OECD, which at 35 percent imposes a real burden on corporations earning mostly U.S.-source income. At the same time, U.S.-based multinationals pay very low effective tax rates on foreign-source income earned through their subsidiaries, leading to a strong incentive to shift profits out of the United States. Finally, the United States is among the few countries to fully tax dividends paid by foreign subsidiaries to their domestic parents, leading to the “trapped income” phenomenon in which $2 trillion …

King V. Burwell: Brief For Professors Thomas W. Merrill, Gillian E. Metzger, Abbe R. Gluck, And Nicholas Bagley As Amici Curiae Supporting Respondents, Nicholas Bagley

Appellate Briefs

The Amici teach and write about federalism, constitutional law, and legislation. Amici submit this brief in the hope that its analysis of the federalism issues in this case will be of value to the Court.

The parties to this case have set forth two opposing interpretations of the Exchange provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), Pub. L. No. 111-148, 124 Stat. 119. Under petitioners' interpretation, federal taxpayer subsidies are available only to those who purchase insurance on Exchanges that are set up by the States and are not available to those who do so on HHS-facilitated …

Predicting The Fallout From King V. Burwell - Exchanges And The Aca, Nicholas Bagley, David K. Jones, Timothy Stoltzfus Jost

Articles

The U.S. Supreme Court's surprise announcement on November 7 that it would hear King v. Burwell struck fear in the hearts of supporters of the Affordable Cara Act (ACA). At stake is the legality of an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) rule extending tax credits to the 4.5 million people who bought their health plans in the 34 states that declined to establish their own health insurance exchanges under the ACA. The case hinges on enigmatic statutory language that seems to link the amount of tax credits to a health plan purchased "through an Exchange established by the State." According to …

Eliminating Arbitrary Age Descrimination In 401(K) And Pension Plan Eligibility Requirements: A Simple Fix To Encourage Younger Workers To Save For Retirement, Andrew J. Clopton

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

Current federal law allows companies to exclude their youngest workers from participating in 401(k) and other pension plans. Public policy should encourage young workers to contribute to retirement as early as practicable, rather than impose obstacles to saving. Workers who begin saving even a few years earlier improve their retirement security and reduce the likelihood they will be dependent on the government later in life. While “age discrimination” is conventionally thought of as the mistreatment of older workers, this concept applies equally to employees who are differentiated based solely on their young age. Thus, Congress should amend the Internal Revenue …

Inversions And Competitiveness: Reflections In The Wake Of Pfizer-Allergan, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Omri Marian

Articles

The recent announcement that Pfizer Inc. has reached a merger agreement with Allergan PLC, with the combined entity being tax resident in Ireland, is a good occasion to reconsider U.S. policy options in regard to inversions. We consider an "inversion" as any transaction in which a U.S. corporation becomes foreign for tax purposes without a meaningful change to its underlying business or management activities. This short article explains what we believe to be the true motives of inversion transactions, as well as potential policy responses, in light ofthe Pfizer inversion. Part II explains what is unique about the Pfizer inversion …

Cancellation Of Debt And Related Transactions, Douglas A. Kahn, Jeffrey H. Kahn

Articles

If a taxpayer borrows money, the borrowed funds are not included in the taxpayer's gross income. That treatment is proper even though the taxpayer has increased his assets by the amount he borrowed because he also has created a corresponding liability to pay back the loan. The taxpayer's net: wealth has not increased. 'The more difficult and interesting questions arise when the taxpayer fails to repay the loan. At first blush, it would appear that upon cancellation of a loan, the taxpayer should have income for the amount that was cancelled. However, the current tax treatment is not that simple. …

企業の社会的責任と戦略的租税行動 [Corporate Social Responsibility And Strategic Tax Behavior], Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Keisaku Koga Translator

Articles

This paper addresses two questions. First, from the perspective of the corporation, should the corporation cooperate and pay the corporate tax, or should it engage in "strategic" tax behavior designed to minimize or eliminate its corporate tax burden? Second, from the perspective of the state, should the state use the corporate tax just to raise revenue, or should it also try to use it as a regulatory tool to steer corporate behavior in directions that it deems beneficial to society? The paper argues that whatever our view of the nature of the corporation and of the legitimacy of corporate social …

The Rise And Fall Of The Consumption Tax, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The year 1974 was an eventful one in U.S. history. For the first time, a president resigned under threat of impeachment. Watergate and the Vietnam War shook Americans’ faith in their government. The economy was reeling from the first oil embargo, and the United States’ prospects seemed bleak. In that context, Professor William Andrews of Harvard Law School published an article that would revolutionize tax scholarship. Against the backdrop of widespread dissatisfaction with the government in general and the income tax in particular, Andrews suggested replacing the income tax with a consumption tax. That suggestion was ironic for anyone familiar …

Taxation And Inequality: A Case For The Vat., Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The author shows that a progressive income tax has had little effect on after-tax income inequality. Social programs, however, do create a more equal society. He proposes a national sales tax—a value-added tax—to finance more such social programs as America's best route to a more equal society.

Profits V. Purpose: Hybrid Companies And The Charitable Dollar, Rachel Culley, Jill R. Horwitz

Law & Economics Working Papers

Social entrepreneurship -- a catch-all term meaning harnessing business practices for social good -- has attracted people who want to “do well while doing good” for decades. Advocates of the idea have succeeded in blurring the boundaries among legal ownership types and inspired nonprofit/for-profit joint ventures, public-private partnerships, and the widespread privatization of traditional government functions and activities. The most recent manifestation of this trend is the creation of hybrid non-profit/for-profit firms. In the United States, the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company (L3C) is growing, and there are similar firms in the United Kingdom and Canada. In this paper we address …

Congress Promotes Perpetual Trusts: Why?, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Law & Economics Working Papers

This posting updates the article titled Congress Promotes Perpetual Trusts: Why?. The article was originally posted on SSRN in September 2013. The updated version incorporates a discussion of two new developments—the unveiling of the long-awaited House Ways and Means Committee’s proposal for comprehensive tax reform and the issuance of the president’s proposed budget for 2015. Both of these new developments are disappointing because neither proposes curtailing or effectively curtailing perpetual trusts. By unwittingly granting a tax exemption for perpetual trusts, Congress undermined state perpetuity law and promoted private trusts that can last and remain tax exempt for many centuries and …

Reconciling Tax Law And Securities Regulation, Omri Marian

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Issuers in registered securities offerings must disclose the expected tax consequences to investors investing in the offered securities (“nonfinancial tax disclosure”). This Article advances three arguments regarding nonfinancial tax disclosures. First, nonfinancial tax disclosure practice, as the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) has sanctioned it, does not fulfill its intended regulatory purposes. Currently, nonfinancial tax disclosures provide irrelevant information, sometimes fail to provide material information, create unnecessary transaction costs, and divert valuable administrative resources to the enforcement of largely-meaningless requirements. Second, the practical reason for this failure is the SEC and tax practitioners’ unsuccessful attempt to address investors’ heterogeneous …

From Here To Eternity: The Folly Of Perpetual Trusts, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Law & Economics Working Papers

Trusts that can operate for as many as a thousand years or even forever, typically for the benefit of the settlor’s descendants living from time to time, now and in the future, are all the rage in banking and estate-planning circles. Before 1986, when Congress passed the federal generation-skipping transfer tax (GST tax), settlors had little incentive and probably little desire to establish perpetual trusts, even though they were permitted to do so under the law of Wisconsin, South Dakota, or Idaho. The GST tax created an artificial incentive for the wealthy to establish such trusts. The origin of the …

The Parallel March Of The Ginis: How Does Taxation Relate To Inequality And What Can Be Done About It?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

The United States currently has one of the highest levels of inequality among industrialized economies. In addition, numerous scholars have shown that social mobility in the United States is significantly lower than it was in the period between 1945 and 1970, when inequality was also declining. The combination of these trends is dangerous because it risks transforming the US into a society where small elites capture most of the gains, a pattern in which growth cannot be sustained over time (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, Zingales 2012). The level of inequality in the US after taxes and transfers are taken into …

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 …

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 …

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 …

The Devil In The Details: Reflections On The Tax Reform Act Of 2014, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

The Discussion Draft of the “Tax Reform Act of 2014” (TRA14) released by US House Committee on Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) on February 26, 2014 represents a major effort for fundamental and far reaching reform of US tax law. Unfortunately, while many parts of the proposal seem quite sensible as an effort to bring back the “spirit of 1986”, the international tax reform proposals are deeply flawed and based on obsolete assumptions on the world facing US multinationals in 2014.

Overall, TRA14 represents a welcome effort to propose a revenue neutral combination of base broadening and rate …

Just Say No: Corporate Taxation And Corporate Social Responsibility, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

This article will address the question whether publicly traded US corporations owe a duty to their shareholders to minimize their corporate tax burden in any way that they may be able to get away with from a purely legal perspective. First, however, to render the subsequent discussion a bit more concrete, I will describe a recently unveiled case study of corporate tax aggressiveness.

The Individual Mandate Tax Penalty, Jeffrey H. Kahn

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In 2010, President Obama signed legislation that significantly altered the healthcare and health insurance markets in the United States. An integral part of that reform is the individual mandate, a provision that requires individuals to purchase and maintain healthcare insurance. Failure to maintain such coverage subjects an individual to a tax penalty. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that provision under Congress’s taxing power. Despite the Supreme Court upholding the individual mandate, fundamental questions remain. This Article addresses the question of whether the use of a tax penalty to encourage taxpayers to do something that the government desires is …

Are Cryptocurrencies Super Tax Havens?, Omri Marian

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Virtual currencies are online payment systems that may function as real currencies but are not issued or backed by central governments. As demonstrated by recent events, virtual currencies present regulators with significant challenges. On May 23, 2013, the U.S. federal government brought an indictment against the operators of Liberty Reserve, a popular virtual currency, charging the operators with money laundering and operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business. The same month, the Government Accountability Office ("GAO") made public a report exploring the potential tax-compliance risks associated with virtual currencies and economies. Legislators have also taken particular interest in one type of virtual …

Taxing Food And Beverage Products: A Public Health Perspective And A New Strategy For Prevention, Jennifer L. Pomeranz

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The power to tax and spend is considered a primary government power, and the use thereof is associated with great public health achievements. The greatest public health challenge at present stems from the increase in obesity and chronic diseases due to poor nutrition. Several taxation strategies have emerged in the health and economic literature to raise revenue, deter consumption, and address food prices and obesity directly. These proposals include taxing obese individuals, taxing problematic food products, and instituting a tax based on certain food components. This article weighs each proposal's value and disadvantages and concludes by proposing a new tax …

Taxing The Platypygous, James J. White

Articles

This Article maintains that obesity in the United States is an enormous public health issue that causes the health care costs of the obese Americans greatly to exceed those of citizens of normal weight. Recognizing that that much of that cost will be born by publicly financed programs and that the taxes supporting those programs will constitute an externality that the fat impose on the thin, the Article proposes a tax on high calorie food-but only when that food is purchased by the obese. The Article addresses many of the administrative, moral and other objections to a tax aimed at …

Carbon Tax, Health Care Tax, Bank Tax, And Other Regulatory Taxes, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Book Chapters

The momentous decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act (PPACA) took sides in a long-running dispute about whether taxation can legitimately be used for purposes other than raising revenue for the government. The context was the imposition by Congress of a monetary penalty on individuals who refuse to buy health insurance. Opponents of the Act argued that calling this levy a tax added nothing to its constitutional validity since "the noncompliance penalty . .. does not meet the historical criteria for a tax" because "the clear purpose of …

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

Law & Economics Working Papers

U.S. taxpayers are currently required to pay the greater of their liabilities under the regular income tax and their liabilities under the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). Despite its unpopularity, the AMT serves the function of permitting Congress to offer tax preferences for certain activities and expenditures while maintaining a progressive tax system. This paper examines this role of the AMT, and explores the possibility of adding an Alternative Maximum Tax (AMxT) that would augment the impact of the AMT. An AMxT limits a taxpayer’s liability to the minimum of the amount due under the regular income tax and the amount …

Territoriality: For And Against, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

This article will survey the main arguments for and against territoriality and conclude that it is the wrong way to go in the short run, but can perhaps be adopted in the medium to long run in conjunction with more fundamental international tax reform. The main reason that territoriality should not be adopted now is that the OECD may be about to recommend worldwide consolidation for all its members as part of the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project, and if the OECD does that, all of the standard arguments in favor of territoriality and against abolishing deferral disappear.

Unitary Taxation And International Tax Rules, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

Any proposal to adopt Unitary Taxation (UT) of multinationals has to contend with whether such taxation is compatible with existing international tax rules and in particular with the bilateral tax treaty network. Indeed, some researchers have argued that the separate accounting (SA) method and the arm’s length standard are so embodied in the treaties that they form part of customary international law and are binding even in the absence of a treaty. In this paper we will argue that UT can be compatible with most of the existing tax treaties, and that developing countries in particular can implement it in …

And Yet It Moves: A Tax Paradigm For The 21st Century, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

A central premise of tax scholarship of the last thirty years has been the greater mobility of capital than labor. Recently, scholars such as Edward Kleinbard have recommended that the US adopt a variant of the 'dual income tax' model used by the Scandinavian countries, under which income from capital is subject to significantly lower rates than labor income because of its supposedly greater mobility. This article argues that the premise upon which this argument is built is mistaken, because for individual US taxpayers (as opposed to corporations), there are significant limitations on their ability to avoid tax by moving …

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

Law & Economics Working Papers

The thesis of this article is that the tax expenditure concept is grounded on an erroneous vision of the structure of an income tax system. The tax expenditure concept adopts a binary view of income taxation. It posits that there is an ideal or pure income tax system whose provisions are elements of the normal structure of that system without any influence from non-tax policy considerations. Tax provisions are described either as falling within those core provisions or outside of them. There are no other categories. To the contrary, this article contends that tax provisions lie on a continuum in …