Tax Law Commons^™

Five-Star Exclusion: Modern Silicon Valley Companies Are Pushing The Limits Of Section 119 By Providing Tax-Free Meals To Employees , Austin L. Lomax

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

Should Organizations Promoting Dangerous Sports Enjoy Maximum Tax Benefits?, William A. Drennan

San Diego Law Review

Perhaps one in every 1000 BASE jumps results in death, and the fatality and injury rates for BASE jumping may be forty-three times higher than for standard skydiving. Some other new sports are extremely dangerous. In addition, some medical researchers are finding that repeated jolts to the head in traditional contact sports correlate to midlife Alzheimer’s disease, suicide, depression, inability to work or function without a caregiver, and early death from the brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). “[N]early a quarter of a million new patients turn up each year with long-term deficits resulting from . . . so-called mild …

Income Or Liability: How Casinos' Classification Of Outstanding Chips Determine Taxability, John Bulloch

UNLV Gaming Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Drilling And Deductions: Making The Section 170(H) Conservation Easement Work In The Shale Boom Era, Michael T. Fulks

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taxation And Incentives In The Business Enterprise, David Gamage, Shruti Rana

Faculty Scholarship

This book chapter discusses the tax perspective on business enterprise law with a comparative focus on the U.S. and Japan.

Pfics Gone Wild!, Monica Gianni

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article discusses the U.S. tax rules for passive foreign investment companies, or PFICs. The historical development leading up to the enactment of the PFIC rules in 1986 is examined. Unexpected tax consequences resulting from the PFIC rules are analyzed in detail. Recommendations to modify the rules so that they do have such onerous consequences follow, concluding that the PFIC rules cannot be sufficiently fixed and should be repealed.

Citizens United And Social Welfare Organizations: The Tangled Relationships Among Guidance, Compliance, And Enforcement, Frances R. Hill

Articles

No abstract provided.

Is It Time To Revoke The Tax-Exempt Status Of Rural Electric Cooperatives?, W. G. Beecher

Washington and Lee Journal of Energy, Climate, and the Environment

Rural electric cooperatives (RECs) were created with government assistance in the mid-1930s as part of a campaign to bring electricity to rural areas in an effort to improve economic output and quality of living. By the early 1950s, the entirety of America had access to electricity, fulfilling the federal government’s mission. Today, these cooperatives strongly resemble their for-profit counterparts, but remain tax-exempt under § 501(c)(12) of the Internal Revenue Code. This note will argue that, in light of the changes that RECs have undergone and the environment in which they now operate, their tax-exempt status is no longer warranted and …

Tax Advice For The Second Obama Administration, Paul L. Caron

Pepperdine Law Review

Twenty-five of the nation’s leading tax academics, practitioners, journalists, and public intellectuals gathered in Malibu, California on the Friday before President Obama’s second inauguration to plead for tax reform. The papers published in this issue of the Pepperdine Law Review provide very different prescriptions for America’s tax ills. But there is a unanimous diagnosis that the country’s tax system is sick indeed. A re-elected president’s inauguration offers a particularly propitious moment to put politics aside and embark on a treatment plan. If our lawmakers are interested in healing our tax wounds, the ideas presented in these pages offer a good …

The Relevance Games: Congress's Choices For Economic Substance Gamemakers, Charlene Luke

UF Law Faculty Publications

Codification of the economic substance doctrine in 2010 ushered in a new phase in the debate regarding the meaning and reach of the doctrine. The main statutory hint as to the intended scope of the codified economic substance doctrine is ambiguous, providing, “The determination of whether the economic substance doctrine is relevant to a transaction shall be made in the same manner as if this subsection had never been enacted.” This Article argues that this language should be read in light of the codification history, which stretches back for over ten years before enactment. This history suggests that the relevance …

Recent Developments In Federal Income Taxation: The Year 2012, Martin J. Mcmahon Jr., Ira B. Shepard, Daniel L. Simmons

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 the most recent twelve months - 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 …

Close The Loophole: The Marketplace Fairness Act And Its Likely Passage, Bryan J. Soukup

Law Student Publications

In this stagnant economy, brick and mortar retailers (brick and mortars) are voicing increasingly strong objections to the current state of online tax collection considering they must always collect state sales tax. Due in part to this uneven playing field, brick and mortars lose thousands of dollars a day in sales to online retailers. States, too, are losing revenue in the form of unpaid use taxes and, like the brick and mortars, are proponents of legislation allowing states to require online retailers to collect sales tax from their customers. Proponents of federal legislation on this issue point to the fact …

Understanding Consolidated Returns, Martin J. Mcmahon Jr.

UF Law Faculty Publications

Section 1501 allows all of the members of an affiliated group of corporations to elect to file a consolidated return. A consolidated return permits the includible members of an affiliated group of corporations to combine their incomes into a single return. The detailed rules for filing consolidated returns are found in regulations promulgated pursuant to a broad delegation of authority in section 1502 of the Internal Revenue Code. In general, the regulations reflect a “single entity” approach that attempts to treat the several members of a consolidated group in the same manner as divisions of a single corporation. This article …

Recent Developments In Federal Income Taxation: The Year 2011, Martin J. Mcmahon Jr., Ira B. Shepard, Daniel L. Simmons

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 the most recent twelve months - 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 …

What Do Courts Have To Do With It?: The Judiciary's Role In Making Federal Tax Law, Leandra Lederman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The Internal Revenue Code is an important source of federal tax law, but it is not the only source. The U.S. Department of the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service issue important guidance, and federal courts interpret all of these authorities. This essay provides an overview of federal tax litigation, at both the trial and appellate levels, and discusses the interplay among Congress, the Treasury, and the judiciary in developing federal tax law.

The Battle Over Taxing Offshore Accounts, Itai Grinberg

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The international tax system is in the midst of a contest between automatic information reporting and anonymous withholding models for ensuring that nations have the ability to tax offshore accounts. At stake is the extent of many countries’ capacity to tax investment income of individuals and profits of closely held businesses through an income tax in an increasingly financially integrated world.

Incongruent initiatives of the European Union, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Switzerland, and the United States together represent an emerging international regime in which financial institutions act to facilitate countries’ ability to tax their residents’ offshore …

Proposed 2009 Regulations Dealing With § 356 Nonrecognition Rules Should Be Given The Boot, Terri Guinn

San Diego Law Review

"Fire, Aim, Ready!" Could this be the approach taken by the Internal Revenue Service (the Service) in its attempt to finalize regulations, proposed more than two years ago, that would specify a new method for determining a shareholder's taxable gains and losses in certain reorganization transactions? Has the Service decided to elevate theory over practicality without thinking through all of the ramifications of these regulations? Finalizing these proposed regulations in their current form may have serious unintended consequences. As drafted, they miss their intended mark by inadvertently creating a loophole whereby some shareholders could take immediate losses on some of …

Reframing Economic Substance, Karen C. Burke

UF Law Faculty Publications

Under the economic substance doctrine as codified in 26 U.S.C. § 7701(o), legislatively unintended tax benefits may be disallowed if a transaction lacks a substantial business purpose or fails to accomplish a meaningful change in the taxpayer's economic position. In a recent article on framing the “transaction” in economic substance cases, David Hariton makes three interrelated points. First, he observes that even though the judicial outcome may depend largely on how the relevant transaction is framed, few courts have explicitly focused on the framing issue. Second, he proposes that courts should presumptively frame the underlying transaction broadly by focusing on …

Tax Deregulation, Steven A. Dean

Faculty Scholarship

Deregulation has played both the hero and the villain in recent years. This Article evaluates the impact of deregulation on what may be the single most economically important regulatory regime: the income tax. In order to accomplish this goal, it applies the concepts of fiscal arbitrage and compliance spirals to three deregulatory tax reforms. Compliance spirals describe an enforcement dynamic in which the regulator encourages compliance through a system of rewards for cooperation and punishment for noncooperation. Fiscal arbitrage describes policy measures that exploit cognitive biases and other anomalies to deliver political benefits by using minimal political capital. The combination …

Recent Developments In Federal Income Taxation: The Year 2010, Martin J. Mcmahon Jr., Ira B. Shepard, Daniel L. Simmons

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 the year 2010--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 …

From Programmatic Reform To Social Science Research: The National Tax Association And The Promise And Perils Of Disciplinary Encounters, Ajay K. Mehrotra, Joseph J. Thorndike

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article uses the history of the National Tax Association (NTA), the leading twentieth-century organization of tax professionals, to strengthen our empirical understanding of the disciplinary encounter between law and the social sciences. Building on existing sociolegal scholarship, this article explores how the NTA embodied tax law's ambivalent historical interaction with public economics. Since its founding in 1907, the NTA has changed dramatically from an eclectic and catholic organization of tax professionals with a high public profile to an insular, scholarly association of mainly academic public finance economists. Using a mix of quantitative and qualitative historical evidence, we contend that …

Organizational Representation And The Frontiers Of Gatekeeping, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

I spend more than half of my Professional Responsibility (“PR”) survey course discussing issues distinctive to organizational clients. I do so in part to take into account the realities of practice. If we can generalize from John Heinz and Edward Laumann’s Chicago study, about sixty-five percent of lawyering time is devoted to organizational clients. Yet, the PR issues involved in representing organizational clients occupy a comparatively small portion of legal doctrine, casebooks, and scholarship.

Another reason I emphasize organizational clients is that recent developments in this sphere, especially in securities and tax, have great general interest.

Taxing Structured Settlements, Gregg D. Polsky, Brant J. Hellwig

Scholarly Works

Congress has granted a tax subsidy to physically injured tort plaintiffs who enter into structured settlements. The subsidy allows these plaintiffs to exempt from the tax the investment yield imbedded within the structured settlement. The apparent purpose of the subsidy is to encourage physically injured plaintiffs to invest, rather than presently consume, their litigation recoveries. While the statutory subsidy by its terms is available only to physically injured tort plaintiffs, a growing structured settlement industry now contends that the same tax benefit of yield exemption is available to plaintiffs’ lawyers and non-physically injured tort plaintiffs under general, common-law tax principles. …

The Discursive Failure In Comparative Tax Law, Omri Y. Marian

UF Law Faculty Publications

Tax comparatists tend to bemoan the grim status of their chosen field. Complaints are aimed both at the scarcity of decent comparative legal tax scholarship, and at the lack of a theoretical foundation for the study of comparative tax law. The purpose of this Article is to portray a more sanguine, yet critical, view of this field. Sanguine, since a sympathetic reading of contemporary comparative tax scholarship demonstrates that there is more than enough such scholarship to generate a lively debate on comparative tax works and their methodologies. Critical, since all of these works fail to produce even the faintest …

Foreword, David M. Schizer

Faculty Scholarship

I would like to congratulate the editors and staff of the Columbia Journal of Tax Law on their inaugural edition. It is very exciting for me to participate in the birth of a new journal in an area of such importance to financial and economic policy.

A Framework For An Informed Study Of The Realistic Role Of Tax In A Development Agenda, Yariv Brauner

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article builds on the insights of this development research to develop a new agenda for tax incentives (and equivalent tax measures), the research of their merits when used by developing countries, and their optimal design. The stated goal of these incentives is to attract foreign direct investment, and ultimately enhance economic growth and promote development. Almost all countries use such tax incentives, and business interests strongly support and even demand their use, yet, economic research in general, and the international economic organizations in particular, have been skeptical about their effectiveness." Tax incentives are not only ubiquitous, but also very …

Taxes And Death: The Rise And Demise Of An American Law Firm, Milton C. Regan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Misconduct by lawyers in law firms is often attributed to pressures from increasing competition for legal services. Modern firms do face fierce competitive pressures. We can gain more subtle insights, however, by focusing on the specific markets in which particular firms operate and the ways in which forms of influence in law firms interact with common patterns of behavior in organizations.

This paper, a chapter in the collection Law Firms, Legal Culture, and Legal Practice, draws on this type ofanalytical framework to provide a case study of the experience of Jenkens & Gilchrist, a national law firm that had …

The Case Against Tax Incentives For Organ Transfers, Lisa Milot

Scholarly Works

Each year some 6,700 Americans die while awaiting an organ transplant. On its face, this fact seems almost inconsequential, representing less than 3% of American deaths annually. However, for the nearly 100,000 patients on the transplant wait list (and their families), nothing could be more consequential. What is more, the demand for transplantable organs is sure to rise as (1) more diseases become subject to prevention or cure, making organ failure the first sign of medical problems; (2) the success rate for transplants increases, leading to wider use; and (3) barriers to inclusion on the wait list are removed.

In …

Value In The Eye Of The Beholder: The Valuation Of Intangibles For Transfer Pricing Purposes, Yariv Brauner

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article assesses the desirability of our current, arms' length based, transfer pricing regime by analyzing its theoretical and practical effectiveness in application to transfers of intangibles. A detailed analysis of the practice of valuation of intangibles, which is the key component in the application of this regime, exposes its weaknesses that result in undesirable market incentives. These incentives create a strong bias in favor of large multinational enterprises, yet, even if one favored such bias, it is achieved using an uncontrollable, costly and wasteful legal mechanism. The article particularly criticizes the regime's disregard of the unique characteristics of intangibles …

The Incomplete Global Market For Tax Information, Steven A. Dean

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.