Tax Law Commons^™

A Crash At The Crossroads: Tax And Campaign Finance Laws Collide In Regulation Of Political Activities Of Tax-Exempt Organizations, Elizabeth Kingsley, John Pomeranz

William Mitchell Law Review

[T]his article will look at the tax law's definitions of “political” activity by § 501(c)(3)s, other § 501(c)s, and § 527s, identifying the many points of congruence and the occasional important differences. We further attempt to explain why the FEC's detour onto the slippery pavement of tax law led to this crash, and why attempts to follow the tax law's definitions of political activity will inevitably lead regulatory efforts astray. The legal roads of tax and election law begin from different policy rationales, intersect in seemingly similar concepts, but then proceed to wildly different legal destinations. We conclude with a …

The Tax Treatment Of International Philanthropy And Public Policy, Robert Paine

Akron Tax Journal

This paper concerns the tax treatment of charitable contributions made to foreign organizations. Specifically, it discusses the current tax structure that governs contributions made by United States taxpayers to charitable organizations located outside the U.S. and its possessions.

Rethinking The Jurisdiction Of Bankruptcy Courts Over Post-Confirmation Federal Tax Liabilities: Towards A New Jurisprudence Of 11 U.S.C. 505, Shu-Yi Oei

Akron Tax Journal

This paper argues that the current approach that bankruptcy courts have taken in circumscribing the reach of § 505 over liabilities that may arise after the plan has been confirmed and discharged is unsatisfactory. Instead of turning to jurisdictional and constitutional sources external to § 505, the reach of § 505(a) should be determined through imposing a bright line limitation internal to § 505 itself. It is the contention of this paper that based on the location of § 505 in the Bankruptcy Code, the overall structure of the Code, and the legislative history of the provision, the authority contained …

Rush Prudential Hmo, Inc. V. Moran: 21 Or Bust! Does Erisa Preemption Give Hmos The Power To Gamble With Our Health?, Stephanie Reinhart

Akron Tax Journal

Section II, Part A of this Note will discuss the history of ERISA law, including a look at what Congress intended to achieve in enacting such a broadly preemptive doctrine. Parts B and C will explain the complicated and highly technical provisions that make up ERISA as it pertains to health care benefits law. Finally, Part D will navigate several key cases leading up to the Rush decision and explain how each case contributed to the Court's decision. Following the background of ERISA law, Section III will discuss the facts of the Rush case, charting the journey that brought this …

The New Dividend Tax Cut; Bush's Prescription For Rescuing The Economy, Beckett G. Cantley

Akron Tax Journal

The purpose of this paper is to cover the Act as passed by Congress and signed by President Bush, discussing each of the major provisions contained within the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act and examining the differing views as to whether it will succeed.

Putting Sec Heat On Corporate Tax Shelters And Audit Firms: Responding To Tax Risk With Sunshine, Shame And Strict Liability, Linda M. Beale

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Searching For Federal Tax Liens: The Typical Search For Ucc Financing Statements May Not Be Good Enough, Dennis H. Long

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Paradox Of The Misuse Of Administrative Law In Erisa Benefit Claims, 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 727 (2004), Mark D. Debofsky

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lost Pension Money: Who Is Responsible? Who Benefits?, 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 695 (2004), Ellen A. Bruce J.D., John Turner Ph.D.

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Cash Balance Plan: An Integral Component Of The Defined Benefit Plan Renaissance, 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 753 (2004), Barry Kozak

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Practical Planning Ideas For Distibutions From Iras And Qualified Plans, 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 807 (2004), Steven R. Lifson

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Counting The Cash: Disclosure And Cash Balance Plans, 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 849 (2004), Dana M. Muir

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

Keeping Employees' Trust: The Rocky Road Ahead For Pension Plan Trustees, 37 J. Marshall L. Rev. 903 (2004), Nikolay A. Ouzounov

UIC Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Clean-Fuel Vehicle Tax Deduction: Will It Drive An Increase In Fuel Efficiency Standards, Heather Munoz

Villanova Environmental Law Journal (1991 - )

No abstract provided.

Wither Firpta, Fred B. Brown

All Faculty Scholarship

Under FIRPTA, foreign persons are subject to U.S. tax on dispositions of directly held interests in U.S. real property as well as on dispositions of stock in certain U.S. real property holding corporations. Congress enacted FIRPTA to combat several techniques used by foreign persons to avoid U.S. tax on dispositions of U.S. real estate. However, since FIRPTA's enactment, changes in the tax law would defeat these tax avoidance techniques. Consequently, this raises the issue of whether FIRPTA continues to make sense as a policy matter.

This article suggests that the repeal of portions of FIRPTA may be in order and …

Taxing The New Intellectual Property Right, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Faculty Publications

How should the acquisition of domain names be treated under the current tax regime for intellectual property? This article proposes that domain names that function as source identifiers should be treated under the tax regime applicable to trademarks. Generic domain names, however, possess inherent goodwill that dictates different treatment.

Proposed Regulations On Noncompensatory Options: A Light At The End Of The Tunnel, Walter D. Schwidetzky

All Faculty Scholarship

It has become increasingly common for partnerships to issue options. There is a dearth of authority on the federal tax treatment of options to acquire interests in partnerships. In this context, there are two main categories of options, services options and noncompensatory options. Services options, unsurprisingly, are options to acquire partnership interests where the option is received in exchange for services. Noncompensatory options cover the rest of the waterfront. The simplest version of the latter would be partnership analog to normal options found outside the partnership context: the option holder pays the partnership an option premium to acquire an option …

Subverting The Rule Of Law: The Judiciary's Role In Fostering Unethical Behavior, Richard Lavoie

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Most Rational Branch: Guinn V. Legislature And The Judiciary's Role As Helpful Arbiter Of Conflict, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

When the Nevada Supreme Court decided Guinn v. Legislature, one would have thought from reading the popular press accounts that the court had forcibly displaced the State legislature by means of a violent coup d'etat. Newspaper accounts of the decision referred to it as a usurpation of power in violation of clear constitutional language, belittling the court in language sometimes more appropriate to the baseball bleachers than to serious editorial commentary. Following suit, politicized elements of the citizenry began a recall effort (seemingly unsuccessful as of this writing) directed at the court as well as joining the chorus of criticisms. …

Innocent Spouses: A Critique Of The New Tax Laws Governing Joint And Several Tax Liability, Lily Kahng

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Taxing The New Intellectual Property Right, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Articles

Current, albeit arbitrary, rules exist governing the tax treatment of traditional forms of intellectual property, such as patents, trade secrets, copyrights, trademarks, and trade names. While tax principles exist for these traditional intellectual property and intangible rights, specific tax rules do not exist for new intellectual property rights, such as domain names, that are emerging with the arrival of global electronic commerce transactions on the Internet. This article explores the proper tax treatment of domain name registration and acquisition costs, addressing these parallel questions? Are domain names merely variations of traditional forms of intellectual property and other intangible rights to …

Market Bubbles And Wasteful Avoidance: Tax And Regulatory Constraints On Short Sales, Michael R. Powers, David M. Schizer, Martin Shubik

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, a speculative bubble in Internet stocks has burst and several "blue chip" firms have failed amidst high profile allegations of corporate misconduct. Why did high-tech start-ups with no earnings attain such lofty valuations? Why didn't sophisticated investors keep prices at saner levels? And why didn't more sophisticated investors look past accounting gimmicks much earlier to uncover problems at Enron and other firms? More generally, why did the mechanisms of market efficiency prove inadequate? While there obviously is no single answer to these complex questions, this Article focuses on one piece of the problem: U.S. tax and regulatory …

Corporations, Society, And The State: A Defense Of The Corporate Tax, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

Corporations are both everywhere and nowhere. They are everywhere, first and foremost, on the economic scene: a large percentage of economic activity in the United States is effectuated through the corporate form. But the reach of corporations is far broader than that. Many of our other institutions, including universities, churches, hospitals, and other non-profit organizations, are in corporate form. Other salient features of our society, such as representative democracy, originated from the use of the corporate form in medieval England. Even the idea of the state itself originated in Roman and Medieval legal notions about corporate bodies.

Bridging The North/South Divide: International Redistribution And Tax Competition, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The most important social problem facing humanity at the beginning of the 21st century is the yawning divide in standards of living between the rich nations of the global North and the poor nations of the global South. The following table gives some indicia of the current gap in living standards. It shows that the majority of the population in most developing countries lives on less than two dollars a day; that in some developing countries, over a quarter of children aged 10-14 are employed in the work force; that mortality for children under five in developing countries can be …

Revisiting The Roles Of Legal Rules And Tax Rules In Income Redistribution: A Response To Kaplow & Shavell, Ronen Avraham, David Fortus, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

The debate over whether legal rules should be used to redistribute resources in society or whether redistribution should be left exclusively to the tax-and-transfer system has long occupied philosophers, political theorists, economists, and legal academicians. For many years, the conventional wisdom on this question among legal scholars seemed to be that blanket generalizations were inappropriate. All systems of redistribution distort individuals' choices and entail administrative costs. Therefore, the argument went, a universal preference for using the tax-and-transfer system to redistribute is not justified. Rather, the choice among institutions to accomplish society's redistributive goals was considered to be "an empirical one …

The Changing Accountability Climate And Resulting Demands For Improved Fiduciary Capacity Affecting The World Of Public Charities, Ellen W. Mcveigh, Eve R. Borenstein

William Mitchell Law Review

In the wake of the scandals at major corporations such as Enron and WorldCom, attorneys general of several states are proposing additional legislative reforms to ensure financial accountability of nonprofit organizations, and both the Senate Finance Committee and House Ways and Means Committee have recently held hearings on proposed reforms for exempt organizations. These increasing demands for accountability have, in turn, amplified the pressure on boards of directors of all nonprofit organizations to govern effectively. But what is effective governance in this new climate of accountability, particularly for organizations holding exalted status under I.R.C. § 501(c)(3) and concomitant “public charity” …

Opining On The 501(C)(3) Tax-Free Bond Transaction: Avoiding Common Borrower's Counsel Misconceptions, Gina M. Torielli

William Mitchell Law Review

There are two areas where borrowers’ counsel can easily misstep when representing a charitable organization in a tax-exempt bond deal. The first is failing to recognize that “private business use” under § 145 can (and does) result in situations that would not constitute an “unrelated trade or business” of the borrower. The second occurs when borrowers’ counsel conflate the test for “unrelated business taxable income” under § 512 with the use of “unrelated trades or businesses” in the definition of a qualified 501(c)(3) bond under § 145. A mistake in either of these areas could lead to an erroneous opinion …

Decoupling Tax Exemption For Charitable Organizations, Charles A. Borek

William Mitchell Law Review

[T]his article proposes a new approach to defining the term “charitable” for tax purposes that both respects the essence of tax-exempt eleemosynary activity and injects an element of clarity that has eluded the use of the term in modern tax parlance. Part I traces the evolution of the legal concept of charity, with emphasis on the shift in focus from poverty relief to social action facilitated through the device of trust law. I argue that it is in this shift of emphasis that the concept of charity became entangled in property concepts and thereby transformed into something wholly unrelated to …

Tax-Exempt Organizations And Internet Commerce: The Application Of The Royalty And Volunteer Exceptions To Unrelated Business Taxable Income, Leeanna Izuel, Leslie Y. Park

William Mitchell Law Review

The Internet has created new opportunities for both large and small tax-exempt organizations (EOs) to raise funds through relationships with online vendors and “charity malls.” EOs provide hyperlinks to online vendors' websites through affiliate arrangements. In return, EOs receive payments based on a percentage of sales made at the vendor websites attributable to the EOs' hyperlinks. EOs also enter into payment arrangements with charity malls. Charity malls are commercial websites that provide hyperlinks to online vendors and attract consumers by pledging to donate a percentage of any purchases made through the malls to charity. There is no express authority stating …

Charitable State Registration And The Dormant Commerce Clause, Charles Nave

William Mitchell Law Review

Charitable solicitation in the U.S. is regulated by “the several States.” For most of the nation's history, charities tended to be local endeavors, raising money and providing relief in their immediate vicinities. In the latter half of the twentieth century, charities increasingly grew beyond these local origins as new technologies enabled even the smallest charities to develop a national reach with direct mail and telemarketing campaigns. Nevertheless, primary authority for regulating charitable solicitations remained with the states.