Tax Law Commons^™

Defining A Country's "Fair Share" Of Taxes, Adam H. Rosenzweig

Florida State University Law Review

The international tax regime is facing a defining moment. As stories of multinational companies expatriating and shifting income around the world with seeming impunity continue to emerge, the question of how to divide the international tax base among the countries of the world increasingly draws attention from policy-makers and academics. To date, however, the debate has tended to devolve into one over the two traditional tools used to divide worldwide tax base—transfer pricing and formulary apportionment. This Article demonstrates that such focus is misplaced on the instruments of dividing the worldwide tax base rather than on first principles. Instead, this …

Professors Do Not Provide Childs Support, Gregg D. Polsky, Brant J. Hellwig

Scholarly Articles

In "Structuring Legal Fees Without Annuities: Offspring of Childs," Tax Notes, July 20, 2015, p. 341 , Robert W. Wood argues that Childs v. Commissioner, 103 T.C. 634 (1994), provides tremendous investment flexibility for plaintiffs' lawyers who choose to invest their contingent fees in tax-favored structured attorney fee products. Likewise, Gerald Nowotny has recently noted that the Childs case allows those lawyers to invest their contingent fees in private placement variable annuities.

We agree with Wood and Nowotny. In fact, the reasoning of Childs would allow any taxpayer in any industry to use similar vehicles to invest items of …

Transforming Federal And State Retirement Tax Deductions To Refundable Tax Credits, Teresa Ghilarducci, Ismael Cid-Martinez

Marquette Benefits and Social Welfare Law Review

The purpose of this Study is to calculate retirement account tax expenditures by states. States with income taxes that allow tax deferral of retirement account contributions and investment earnings lose nearly $20 billion in revenue. This Study uses a variety of data sources, including state reports from their executive agencies and known estimation techniques to calculate the amount of tax credits that a worker in each state would receive if the deferrals were converted to a refundable tax credit. The average credit under these estimation techniques and calculations would be $172.

Rethinking The Tax-Revenue Effect Of Reit Taxation, Bradley T. Borden

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Northwestern Football And College Athletes: Be Careful What You Wish For, 49 J. Marshall L. Rev. 655 (2015), Patrick Johnston

UIC Law Review

This comment analyzes the arguments the Northwestern University football team have made to the NLRB and discuss potential adverse tax consequences to the Players as a result of those arguments.

A Simpler Verifiable Gift Tax, Wendy G. Gerzog

All Faculty Scholarship

The purpose of this article is to propose a simpler verifiable gift tax, to reassert basic principles of transfer taxes, to encourage simple, outright gifts, and to eliminate some of the major abuses in the current gift tax regime. To accomplish these goals, the proposed tax would simplify gift completion rules, adopt a hard-to-complete rule of transfer taxation, reduce the annual exclusion while expanding the consumption exclusion, and employ loss of preference inducements to increase gift tax compliance.

For Better And Worse: The Differing Income Tax Treatments Of Marriage At Different Income Levels, Lawrence A. Zelenak

Faculty Scholarship

Although both marriage penalties and marriage bonuses exist at all income levels under the federal income tax, the system is tilted toward penalties for lower-income couples, toward bonuses for middle-income couples, and back toward penalties for upper income couples. This Article begins by explaining how the tax rules produce these differing treatments of marriage at different points in the income distribution. It then argues that the increase in recent decades in the social acceptability and prevalence of cohabitation makes tax marriage effects a more serious concern--in terms of both behavioral, effects and fairness-than in earlier decades. After demonstrating that Congress …

Sustainable Finance - A Blueprint For Severance Taxes In The Marcellus Shale, Ryan Pulver

Kentucky Journal of Equine, Agriculture, & Natural Resources Law

No abstract provided.

Changing Residency For Illinois Tax Purposes, 40 S. Ill. U. L.J. 11 (2015), Ronald Z. Domsky

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

Currently, Illinois is in a financial crisis. Amidst this crisis, the First District Appellate Court of Illinois, in 2012, decided Cain v Hamer. In Cain, the issue was whether a pair of snowbirds (retirees spending the winter months in a warmer climate and returning to Illinois each year) were residents of Illinois for income tax purposes when they spent roughly an equal amount of time in Illinois as in Florida. The court narrowed the issue of residency down to two important issues; namely, whether the taxpayers (the “Cains”) changed domicile, and if so, whether their visits to Illinois were temporary …

Overtaxing The Working Family: Uncle Sam And The Childcare Squeeze, Shannon Weeks Mccormack

Articles

Today, many working parents are caught in a “childcare squeeze”: While they require two incomes just to make ends meet, they end up spending a strikingly large percentage of their income on childcare so that they can work away from the home. Worse still, some parents find themselves “squeezed out” of the market entirely, unable to earn the additional income their family requires because they cannot find jobs that pay enough to offset soaring childcare expenses. This Article argues that the tax laws have played an important role in aggravating these hardships. Currently, the Internal Revenue Code treats the childcare …

Taxation And Surveillance: An Agenda, Michael Hatfield

Articles

Among government agencies, the IRS likely has the surest legal claim to the most information about the most Americans: their hobbies, religious affiliations, reading activities, travel, and medical information are all potentially tax relevant. Privacy scholars have studied the arrival of Big Data, the internet-of-things, and the cooperation of private companies with the government in surveillance, but neither privacy nor tax scholars have considered how these technological advances should impact the U.S. tax system. As government agencies and private companies increasingly pursue what has been described as the “growing gush of data,” the use of these technologies in tax administration …

Limiting Tax Expenditures, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

The federal government devotes over a trillion dollars each year to tax provisions that pursue "nontax" goals, such as the deduction for mortgage interest and the exclusion for employer-provided health insurance. Scaling back these "tax expenditures" should be a high priority, as many have urged. Yet too often, the same limit is suggested for a broad range of tax expenditures. In the 2013 budget deal, for instance, Congress revived a single limit on all itemized deductions called the "Pease rule." In 2012, both presidential candidates proposed their own one-size-fits-all limit. In the same year, the United Kingdom imposed a single …

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 …

Profiles - Chicago Literacenter, James Hagy

Rooftops Project

Business news is often filled with stories about incubator spaces and entrepreneurial hubs in which start-up companies can hang out, network, and grow. What might result when these concepts are adapted to bring together diverse not-for-profit organizations focused on similar missions? Professor James Hagy visits Stacy Ratner, Co-Founder and Creative Director of the Chicago Literacy Alliance, and Transwestern’s Larry Serota at the grand opening of Literacenter in downtown Chicago.

Dodging The Taxman: Why The Treasury’S Anti-Abuse Regulation Is Unconstitutional, Linda D. Jellum

Articles

To combat abusive tax shelters, the Department of the Treasury promulgated a general anti-abuse regulation applicable to all of subchapter K of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986. The Treasury targeted subchapter K because unique aspects of the partnership tax laws—including its aggregate-entity dichotomy—foster creative tax manipulation. In the anti-abuse regulation, the Treasury attempted to “codify” existing judicially- created anti-abuse doctrines, such as the business-purpose and economic-substance doctrines. Also, and more surprisingly, the Treasury directed those applying subchapter K to use a purposivist approach to interpretation and to reject textualism. In this article, I demonstrate that the Treasury exceeded both …

Effective Client Selection In Transactional Clinics, Manoj Viswanathan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Answering Canadian Tax Questions: An Introduction To Tax Law Research, Sas Ansari

Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper Series

Income taxation is a complicated area of law that requires a researcher to master not only a large volume of complex legislation, but because of its ‘accessory-law’ nature, also requires good knowledge of many other areas of law (both statutes and common law). This paper provides an introduction to tax law research in the Canadian context. It begins by introducing the tax research process in Part 1 before moving on to discuss how to find the law and material with legally enforceable consequences in Part 2. The paper, in Part 3, discusses primary sources of tax law, and explains how …

Portability, Marital Wealth Transfers, And The Taxable Unit, Bridget J. Crawford

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Prior to 2011, the most efficient estate tax planning for married couples required a minimal level of asset equalization. In order to take maximum advantage of all existing wealth transfer tax exemptions and credits, each spouse needed to own, in an estate tax sense, enough assets to be able to fully utilize the estate tax credit or applicable exemption. This changed with the enactment of estate tax portability in the Economic Growth and Economic Recovery and Relief Act of 2011, which became permanent under the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. “Portability” refers to the ability of a surviving spouse …

Who Wins Residential Property Tax Appeals?, Randall K. Johnson

Faculty Works

This article explains who wins residential property tax appeals in Cook County, Illinois. It does so by collecting and combining public sector data, which has been recently released by the Cook County Assessor. The article then uses this data to compute three statistics. Lastly, it contextualizes each statistic in order to determine if some townships, or groups of townships, win more appeals than expected.

The Moving Target Of Tax Reform, Karen C. Burke, Grayson M.P. Mccouch

UF Law Faculty Publications

In 2000, Professor William Turnier proposed a package of three reforms to make the estate tax more “equitable” and “taxpayerfriendly.” All of his proposals—allowing a surviving spouse to inherit a deceased spouse’s unused exemption, replacing the state death tax credit with a deduction, and indexing the exemption for inflation—were eventually enacted. Today, the estate tax remains on the books, but changes in rates and exemptions have severely curtailed its role in the larger federal tax system. Income tax rate reductions for capital gains and dividends have further lightened the tax burden on capital income, and international pressure to reduce the …

Home-Country Effects Of Corporate Inversions, Omri Y. Marian

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article develops a framework for the study of the unique effects of corporate inversions (meaning, a change in corporate residence for tax purposes) in the jurisdictions from which corporations invert ("home jurisdictions"). Currently, empirical literature on corporate inversions overstates its policy implications. It is frequently argued that in response to an uncompetitive tax environment, corporations may relocate their headquarters for tax purposes, which, in turn, may result in the loss of positive economic attributes in the home jurisdiction (such as capital expenditures, research and development activity, and high-quality jobs). The association of tax-residence relocation with the dislocation of meaningful …

A Conceptual Framework For The Regulation Of Cryptocurrencies, Omri Y. Marian

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Essay proposes a conceptual framework for the regulation of transactions involving cryptocurrencies. Cryptocurrencies offer tremendous opportunities for innovation and development but are also uniquely suited to facilitate illicit behavior. The regulatory framework suggested herein is intended to support (or at least not impair) cryptocurrencies’ innovative potential. At the same time, it aims to disrupt cryptocurrencies’ criminal utility. To achieve these purposes, this Essay proposes a regulatory framework that imposes costs on the characteristics of cryptocurrencies that make them especially useful for criminal behavior (in particular, anonymity) but does not impose costs on characteristics that are at the core of …

Recent Developments In Federal Income Taxation: The Year 2014, Martin J. Mcmahon Jr., Bruce A. Mcgovern, Ira B. Shepard

UF Law Faculty Publications

This recent developments outline discusses, and provides context to understand the significance of, the most important judicial decisions and administrative rulings and regulations promulgated by the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department during 2014--and sometimes a little farther back in time if we find the item particularly humorous or outrageous. Most Treasury Regulations, however, are so complex that they cannot be discussed in detail and, anyway, only a devout masochist would read them all the way through; just the basic topic and fundamental principles are highlighted-- unless one of us decides to go nuts and spend several pages writing one …

The Rescission Doctrine: Everything Old Is New Again, Allen Sparkman

American University Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

Going Green: Legal Considerations For Marijuana Investors And Entrepreneurs, Frank Robison

American University Business Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Estate Planner's Income Tax Playbook, Samuel A. Donaldson

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

Airbnb And The Housing Segment Of The Modern Sharing Economy: Are Short-Term Rental Restrictions An Unconstitutional Taking, Jamila Jefferson-Jones

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Taxes, The Problem And Solution: A Model For Vanishing Deductions And Exclusions For Residence-Based Tax Preferences, Phyllis C. Taite

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Belk V. Commissioner: Land Substitutions In Conservation Easements, Morgan Davis

Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Case For A Canadian Offer-In-Compromise Program, Colin Jackson

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Unlike the American Internal Revenue Service, the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is not permitted to compromise a tax debt or to accept less than the full amount that an impecunious taxpayer owes. Recent estimates of undisputed-uncollected tax debts in Canada approach $29 billion, suggesting it may be time for a change. This article advocates for the implementation of an offer-in-compromise program as a way to mitigate these uncollected tax debts and to promote overall equity in the tax system. The author argues that if the CRA has discretion to accept less than the full amount owed in certain cases, where …