Taxation-Federal Commons^™

Making Sense Of U.S. International Taxation: Six Steps Toward Simplification, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress issued a three-volume study in April 2001 entitled Study of the Overall State of the Federal Tax System and Recommendations for Simplification. Among the more than 100 recommendations of the Joint Committee Study, ten relate to international taxation. Of these, only one can be regarded as achieving significant simplification – the proposal to reduce the number of antideferral regimes from six to two. The other recommendations were limited to relatively minor changes of detail in various international provisions. Even these small steps toward simplifying the notoriously complex U.S. international tax …

Federal Income Taxation Of U.S. Branches Of Foreign Corporations: Separate Entity Or Separate Rules?, Fred B. Brown

All Faculty Scholarship

Foreign corporations conduct U.S. business activities either through U.S. subsidiaries or U.S. branches. A U.S. subsidiary of a foreign corporation generally is taxed as any other domestic corporation, that is, as a separate taxable entity apart from its foreign parent. In contrast, a U.S. branch of a foreign corporation is not treated as a separate taxable entity; instead, the Code and regulations employ a set of special rules that allocate and apportion to the U.S. branch a portion of the foreign corporation's income in order to determine the net income subject to U.S. tax.

The rules used for taxing U.S. …