Taxation-Federal Commons^™

Assessing Internal Revenue Code Section 132 After Twenty Years, Wayne M. Gazur

Publications

In 1984, Congress enacted Internal Revenue Code section 132 to bring more certainty to the taxation of employee fringe benefits. This article examines the impact of the legislation from the standpoint of administrative pronouncements and taxpayer litigation. The article concludes that section 132 has produced little litigation, but primarily because it has played the role of increasing exclusions. It remains unclear whether section 132 has also contained the growth of new forms of nonstatutory fringe benefits.

Tax Preparation Services For Low- And Moderate-Income Households: Preliminary Evidence From A New Survey, Michael S. Barr, Jane K. Dokko

Articles

Recently, researchers have begun to examine the financial service patterns of low- and moderate-income households. These behaviors are of interest because high cost financial services, barriers to saving, the lack of insurance, and credit constraints contribute to poverty and other socioeconomic conditions . Many low- and moderate-income households use alterna­tive financial service (AFS) providers, such as check cashers, for their financial services needs. Tax preparation firms are among the important financial service providers in the lives of low-income households. Such firms help households navigate the complicated process of filing their taxes, and many low-income households obtain sizeable tax refunds. At …

Tax Filing Experiences And Withholding Preferences Of Low- And Moderate-Income Households Preliminary Evidence From A New Survey, Michael S. Barr, Jane Dokko

Other Publications

The United States Federal income tax code has an enormous potential to shape the economic and financial decisions of taxpaying households. Tax rates, compliance laws, and the withholding system create incentives, as do the methods by which the Treasury collects tax receipts and disburses tax refunds. The role of third party service providers in this incentive structure is less well understood, even though tax preparation firms play important roles in our tax system. Nationally, more than half of taxpayers use paid preparers to submit their tax returns. Low- and moderate-income (LMI) households are among those who use the paid tax …

A New I Do: Towards A Marriage-Neutral Income Tax, Shari Motro

Law Faculty Publications

The federal income tax system treats married couples as if each spouse earned approximately one-half of the couple's combined income through a mechanism called "income splitting. " For many one-earner and unequal-earner couples, income splitting produces a significant advantage, a "marriage bonus," by shifting income from higher to lower rate brackets. Marriage-based income splitting relies on a presumption that marriage is a good indicator of economic unity between two taxpayers. It is not. Marriage does not require spousal sharing, and many unmarried couples share everything they earn. As a result, the current system extends the benefit of income splitting to …

Ignore The Rumors—Campaigning From The Pulpit Is Okay: Thinking Past The Symbolism Of Section 501(C)(3), Michael Hatfield

Articles

This Article is enough to ruin many Thanksgiving family dinners. It is about American religion, politics, and taxes. Mostly it is about taxes. As I will explain, this is what sets it apart from the contemporary legal scholarship exploring the campaign restrictions on tax exempt churches. This Introduction identifies the problem addressed in the article, then introduces the contemporary legal scholarship and the alternative approach this article takes.

Part I of this Article introduces the reader to the legal context of "the problem" of churches being unable to campaign if they choose to be Tax Exempt under Section 501 (c) …

Remapping The Charitable Deduction, David Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

If charity begins at home, scholarship on the charitable deduction has stayed at home. In the vast legal literature, few authors have engaged the distinction between charitable contributions that are meant to be used within the United States and charitable contributions that are meant to be used abroad. Yet these two types of contributions are treated very differently in the Code and raise very different policy issues. As Americans' giving patterns and the U.S. nonprofit sector grow increasingly international, the distinction will only become more salient.

This Article offers the first exploration of how theories of the charitable deduction apply …

Cuno: The Property Tax Issue, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

The author criticizes the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cuno v. Daimler Chrysler Inc., in which the court ruled that Ohio's investment tax credit violated the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause. Zelinsky says the dormant Commerce Clause concept of nondiscrimination is overbroad and undefinable and should be abandoned. He hopes this decision will give the U.S. Supreme Court an opportunity to reassess the concept.

Words! Words! Words!: Teaching The Language Of Tax, Stephen B. Cohen

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

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

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Income Tax Issues For Lessors And Lessees (Slides), Susan T. Edlavitch, Robert D. Schachat

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

Recent Developments In Federal Income Taxation, Ira B. Shepard

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

Income Tax Issues For Lessors And Lessees, Susan T. Edlavitch, Robert D. Schachat

William & Mary Annual Tax Conference

No abstract provided.

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

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

Relinquish Control! Why The Irs Should Change Its Stance On Exempt Organizations In Ancillary Joint Ventures, Nicholas A. Mirkay

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Mirage Of Equivalence And The Ethereal Principles Of Parallelism And Horizontal Equity, Jeffrey H. Kahn

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

A Foundation For International Taxation: The Institutional Competence Of Nations, Eric T. Laity

ExpressO

This Article proposes a conceptual foundation for the field of international tax law. The Article refers to this foundation as the institutional competence of nations in global economic development. A nation’s institutional competence is its discretion to make decisions in pursuit of our collective goal of global economic development, discretion that is subject to a number of standards and limitations.

The Article constructs the institutional competence of nations in global economic development from institutional economics, simple game theory, and the literature on social norms. The Article expresses the institutional competence of nations through standards and limitations that reduce the abuse …

Two Tweaks For The Taxation Of Social Security Benefits, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

The ongoing public discussion of possible changes in the Social Security retirement system has largely ignored a small but significant aspect: The relationship between the retirement benefits paid and the federal income tax. Internal Revenue Code section 86 includes Social Security retirement benefits in the federal income tax base on a three-tier system. Individuals may exclude benefits from gross income, include them at 50 percent, or include them at 85 percent. Proposed legislation would repeal the top tier. Modification of section 86, to better accord with the proper measurement of income subject to tax, perhaps embodied in a larger "fix" …

Federal Taxation, Michael H. Plowgian, Svetoslav S. Minkov

Mercer Law Review

In 2004 the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals published three tax decisions of note. In the first of those decisions, the Eleventh Circuit held that taxes that are untimely assessed, yet properly owed and duly paid, are not refundable. In the second, a criminal tax evasion case, the Eleventh Circuit held that enhancing a criminal sentence due to obstruction of justice for making false statements to conceal a fraudulent tax return was not "double counting" under federal sentencing guidelines. Finally, in a brief opinion, the Eleventh Circuit held that "toters" used to transport manufactured homes did not qualify as "tractors" …

To Praise The Amt Or To Bury It, Daniel S. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

The alternative minimum tax (AMT) has recently become a cause célèbre because many more taxpayers are now subject to it than originally envisioned at the time of its enactment in 1969 (and, indeed, than after any of its several modifications over the years). As such, it has been discussed and criticized in the press and by tax professionals and academics, most recently in Tax Notes by four former Internal Revenue Service commissioners who advocated scrapping it entirely. The criticism has questioned the wisdom of the inadvertent expansion of the AMT in coverage, that is, the number of taxpayers who will …

Computing Interest On Overpayments And Underpayments: How Difficult Can It Be? Very!, Mary A. Mcnulty, David H. Boucher, Joseph M. Incorvaia, Robert D. Probasco

Faculty Scholarship

Taxpayers often assume that the difficult part of a tax dispute is resolving the tax liability and penalties, while interest computation is fairly straightforward. In the authors' experience, however, interest determinations are as subject to controversy and prone to error as tax liability determinations. The Article explores some of the areas that taxpayers should review carefully in the process of finalizing interest computations.

- Frequent Errors. The Article reviews twelve areas in which, even though the law is settled and the facts are usually clear, the Service's interest computations frequently include mistakes. Taxpayers need to be aware of these provisions, …

Addressing Imperfections In The Tax System: Procedural Or Substantive Reform?, Leandra Lederman, Stephen W. Mazza

Michigan Law Review

Books about tax administration tend to fall into one of two broad categories: those that paint the Internal Revenue Service ("IRS") as an agency peopled by corrupt, out-of-control bureaucrats who take pleasure in seeing innocent taxpayers suffer, and those that tell readers how to structure their affairs to minimize the risk of incurring an IRS employee's wrath during a tax audit. Perfectly Legal, the full title of which communicates David Cay Johnston's intent to focus on the tax system, does neither of those things. Instead, it is a book much like The Great American Tax Dodge, which explained …

The High School Attainment Credit: A Tax Credit Encouraging Students To Graduate From High School, David Richard Hansen

ExpressO

High school dropouts are a serious problem facing America today. High school dropouts are more likely to be unemployed, earn less money when employed, place a larger burden on the government by requiring public assistance (welfare), and are more likely to be prone to a life of crime and violence than high school completers. While government at all levels continues to focus on schools and teachers in solving the dropout problem, this paper shows how parents are where the focus should lie. This paper proposes a revolutionary tax credit, the High School Attainment Credit (“HSAC”), which would cost-effectively eradicate the …

Taxing The Promise To Pay, Brant J. Hellwig, Gregg D. Polsky

Scholarly Articles

The IRS recently disclosed that it has identified more than 100 executives at 42 leading public corporations that participated in a tax shelter designed to defer the recognition of income from the exercise of stock options. While the agency thus far has identified approximately $700 million in unreported gains from these shelters, it predicts that the revenue loss to the government will ultimately exceed $1 billion. Compared to most tax shelters, this particular transaction (commonly known as the "Executive Compensation Strategy" or "ECS") is remarkably simple. Rather than exercise the options individually, a participating executive instead transfers the options to …

Do Tax Expenditures Create Framing Effects? Volunteer Firefighters, Property Tax Exemptions, And The Paradox Of Tax Expenditure Analysis, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

No abstract provided.

Teaching Tax Stories, Ajay K. Mehrotra

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Saving The Family Farm Through Federal Tax Policy: Easier Said Than Done Alex, Alex E. Snyder

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.

A New Understanding Of Tax, Edward J. Mccaffery

Michigan Law Review

Perhaps we should blame it all on Mill. A great deal and possibly all of the mind-numbing complexity of America's largest and least popular tax follows from the decision to have a progressive personal income tax. Proponents wanted an individual income tax notwithstanding - indeed, in large part because of - such a tax's "double taxation" of savings. This double-tax argument is an analytic point generally attributed to Mill's classic 1848 treatise, Principles of Political Economy. Historically, much of the support for the Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, came from Southern and Midwestern, progressive, agricultural interests, who wanted, in …

The Missing Preferred Return, Victor Fleischer

ExpressO

Managers of buyout funds typically offer their investors an 8% preferred return on their investment before they take a share of any additional profits. Venture capitalists, on the other hand, rarely offer a preferred return. Instead, VCs take their cut from the first dollar of nominal profits. This disparity between venture funds and buyout funds is especially striking because the contracts that determine fund organization and compensation are otherwise very similar. The missing preferred return might suggest that agency costs pose a larger problem in venture capital than previously thought. Is the missing preferred return evidence, perhaps, that VCs are …

Taxing Utility, Terrence Chorvat

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

In order to assess the efficiency of a tax, we should examine its effect on the behavior of individuals. In general, the less a tax affects behavior, the more efficient it is thought to be. The standard example of a non-distorting tax is a lump-sum tax, which does not change with the behavior of the taxpayer. However, this article demonstrates that behavioral distortions can and do arise from a change in even a lump-sum tax. The only truly non-distortionary tax would be one based on utility itself. Utility, which has been used as a norm for distributional analysis, is also …