Taxation-Federal Commons^™

Algorithmic Tax Ownership Young Ran (Christine) Kim &, Young Ran (Christine) Kim, Dmitry Erokhin

BYU Law Review

Tax ownership is a crucial concept for determining tax liabilities, compliance, and enforcement. However, neither the courts nor the IRS has provided clear guidance on how to analyze it. Since the Supreme Court first outlined a twenty-six-factor test for determining tax ownership in Frank Lyon Co. v. United States in 1978, this multifactor test has remained largely unchanged, and there has been no further guidance from the courts or the IRS to this day. Even tests with shorter lists of factors only add to the confusion regarding compliance and enforcement, as there is no clarity on which factors are most …

Weaponization Of Taxation: Sovereign Tax Immunity As A National Security Tool, Vinita R. Singh

BYU Law Review

Amidst calls to reconceptualize taxation as a national security tool, legislators are reexamining how the United States taxes foreign governments. Federal income taxation of foreign governments—what this Article terms “the law of immunity from taxation” or “sovereign tax immunity”—strongly influences whether and how foreign governments pursue investment in the United States. This impact on international business transactions indicates sovereign tax immunity has the potential to be a powerful national security tool. Yet, despite its import, the law of immunity from taxation has been underexplored and undertheorized. This Article steps into this gap in discourse by challenging the way recent legislative …

Valuation Procedure For Condemnation: A Fifty State Survey, David Griffiths

BYU Law Review

The Fifth Amendment requires statutorily authorized condemnors to provide just compensation to landowners for all takings. The procedural method used by states to determine just compensation varies widely among states and is often separate from the more standard procedures existing in traditional civil litigation. Regardless of their method, all fifty states and the District of Columbia each have their own unique procedure for determining just compensation. This Note distinctly classifies the procedural schemes currently used by states to initially value just compensation of condemned property into three general categories: (1) schemes that rely on commissioners to determine just compensation, (2) …

Into The Sunset: Divorcing Families Need Their Slice Of The Tcja Reversions, John C. Mcdonald

BYU Law Review

On its path to sufficiently offsetting its major cut to the corporate income tax rate in 2017, Congress turned to a surprising source for funds: the alimony support payments of recently divorced families. Alimony’s inclusion/deduction regime in §§ 71 and 215 of the Code allowed divorcing couples to reach mutually beneficial divorce agreements for over half a century until it was unceremoniously repealed by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 with a striking lack of satisfying legislative justifications. This Note suggests that in evaluating the impact of the repeal, Congress and others have failed to consider an important …

Valuing Esg, Aneil Kovvali, Yair Listokin

BYU Law Review

Corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) commitments promise to make capitalism better. Unfortunately, ESG has become a hotbed of hype and controversy. The core problem is that ESG mixes vague environmental and social goals with a profit maximization goal and does not provide a framework for resolving the conflicts that exist between them. The result is confusion that invites deception and cynicism. This Article proposes a mechanism for resolving conflicts between goals by translating them into the common language of money. Once nonpecuniary environmental or social goals are translated into dollar values, they can provide clear and actionable guidance for …

Resolving Unfairness In A Fair Way: How The Grantor Trust Rules Should Be Reformed, Aaron T. Anderson

BYU Law Review

Affluent taxpayers often create one or more grantor trusts to achieve significant tax savings. By leveraging mismatches in the rules between the income and estate tax systems, these taxpayers avoid the compressed income tax brackets of trusts while minimizing the property that is included in their estates for estate tax purposes. Some commentators have argued that reform is needed to remove such mismatches. Yet, trusts that rely on the current grantor trust rules abound.

This Note (1) provides a background and history of the rules and use of grantor trusts, (2) argues that harmonizing the estate and income tax systems …

Wealth Transfer Tax Planning After The Tax Cuts And Jobs Act, John A. Miller, Jeffrey A. Maine

BYU Law Review

On December 17, 2017, Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). Among its many impacts, the TCJA increased the inflation-adjusted estate tax basic exclusion amount to $10,000,000 on a temporary basis. This has dramatic implications for many existing and future estate plans, including a major crossover impact on income tax planning. In this Article, we explain the operation of the federal wealth transfer taxes (the estate tax, the gift tax, and the generation skipping transfer tax) in the wake of the TCJA and dissect the basic tax planning techniques for wealth transmission. The overall design of this Article …

Taxing Parents: Welfarist Theories, Shannon Weeks Mccormack

BYU Law Review

The Internal Revenue Code (the "Code") taxes parents inequitably. Couples with a sole earner are undertaxed compared to couples with dual earners and to single parents. Legal tax scholarship (including my own) has identified the many inequities that result from this sole-earner bias and have called for its elimination. But while these arguments have been sufficient for some, they do remain susceptible to the criticism that they are theoretically incomplete.

That critique might proceed as follows. Simply establishing that an inequity exists does not create a full argument for legal reform. After all, it might be argued, the Code plays …

Information Matters In Tax Enforcement, Leandra Lederman, Joseph C. Dugan

BYU Law Review

Most scholars recognize both that the government needs information about taxpayers’ transactions to determine whether their reporting is honest, and that third third-party reporting helps the government obtain that information. Given governments’ reliance on tax collections, it would be risky to think that information or third third-party reporting is not needed by tax agencies. However, a recent article by Professor Wei Cui asserts that “modern governments can practice ‘taxation without information.’” Professor Cui’s argument rests on two claims: (1) “giving governments effective access to taxpayer information through third parties does not explain the success of modern tax administration” because, he …

Mormon Profit: Brigham Young, Tithing, And The Bureau Of Internal Revenue, Samuel D. Brunson

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Per Se Economic Substance, Jesse P. Houchens

BYU Law Review

The economic substance doctrine is used by the IRS and courts to distinguish legal tax avoidance from tax evasion. More specifically, executive and judicial bodies use this doctrine to revoke statutorily compliant tax benefits that arise from transactions that lack, beyond such tax benefits, both a subjective business purpose and an objective economic effect. The most common tool for measuring the objective economic effect of a transaction is the pre-tax profit test. However, disagreement among courts and scholars applying this test has led to taxpayer uncertainty and accusations of reverse-engineered opinions. In this Comment, I reevaluate and propose an alternative, …

Finishing The Job On Section 356(A)(2): Closing Loopholes And Providing Consistent Treatment To Boot In Tax-Free Reorganizations, Trevor Crowley

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Unfair And Unintended: The Tax-Exempt Organization Blocker Loophole, Andrew M. Dougherty

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Wealth Transfer Tax Planning For 2013 And Beyond, John A. Miller, Jeffrey A. Maine

BYU Law Review

On January 1, 2013, Congress avoided the tax part of the so-called “fiscal cliff” when it passed the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (ATRA). Among its many impacts, ATRA prevented the application of a number of sunset provisions that would have dramatically altered the operation of the federal wealth transfer taxes. Instead, Congress made permanent two significant transfer tax provisions introduced as temporary measures in 2010: the $5,000,000 indexed basic exclusion amount and the deceased spousal unused exclusion amount. The latter provisions are sometimes referred to as the portability rules because, in effect, they allow one spouse’s estate tax …

Surrogate Taxation And The Second-Best Answer To The In-Kind Benefit Valuation Riddle, Jay A. Soled

BYU Law Review

For well over a century, theorists have debated how the receipt of inkind benefits, such as meals and lodging furnished for the convenience of an employer and business entertainment opportunities, should be taxed. While debate participants have generally agreed that the receipt of such in-kind benefits constitutes income, the question has remained about whether to value such benefits at fair market value or at the recipient’s subjective value or to use some other metric. Because of administrative considerations in determining the tax base, the Internal Revenue Code (Code) historically used a binary approach: either include the in-kind benefit at its …

Tax Protestors And Penalties: Ensuring Perceived Fairness And Mitigating Systemic Costs, Danshera Cords

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Substantially Deferring To Revenue Rulings After Mead, Ryan C. Morris

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Good Old Habit, Or Just An Old One? Preferential Tax Treatment For Reorganizations, Yariv Brauner

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Preslar V. Commissioner: Debt-Discharge Income And Its Rationale, Chad J. Pomeroy

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Section L04(A)(2) After Commissioner U. Schleier: Litigating The Excludability Of Statutory Damages "Received On Account Of Personal Injuries", T. James Lee Jr.

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Stock Redemptions And The Family-Owned Corporation: Tax Traps Oll The Path To Capital Gain Treatment, Scott E. Copple

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taxes, Morals, And Legitimacy, Leo P. Martinez

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Determining An Individual's Federal Income Tax Liability When The Tax Benefit Rule Applies: A Fifty-Year Checkup Brings A New Prescription For Calculating Gross, Adjusted Gross, And Taxable Incomes, Matthew J. Barrett

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Ethics Reform Act Of 1989: Why The Taxman Can't Be A Paperback Writer, David A. Golden

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Jurisdiction Over Civil Tax Cases, Larry Kramer

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Abortion Politics: The Roman Catholic Church's Tax-Exempt Status In Jeopardy Under Section 501(C)(3) Of The Internal Revenue Code, Junji John Shimazaki

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is It Really Reform? A Theoretical Overview Of The 1986 Tax Reform Act, Daniel L. Simmons

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Overturning Bellas Hess: Due Process Considerations, Sandra B. Mccray

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Internal Revenue Code Section 414(N): Congressional Authorization To Discriminate Among Retirement Plan Participants, David A. Channer

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rca Corp. V. United States: The Latest Round In The Controversy Over Actrual Accounting For Prepaid Income, R. Glen Woods

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.