Taxation-Federal Commons^™

Roger Cpa Review Questions, Roger Philipp

The Contemporary Tax Journal

No abstract provided.

The Contemporary Tax Journal Volume 10, No. 2 – Summer 2021

The Contemporary Tax Journal

No abstract provided.

S. 844 (117th Congress) - Personal Health Investment Today (Phit) Act Of 2021, Neha Nanda, Karla Rees

The Contemporary Tax Journal

No abstract provided.

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 …

The Irs’S Voluntary Disclosure Program: Need For Codification, Jay A. Soled

Georgia State University Law Review

For more than a century, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has had a voluntary disclosure program in place. Its purpose is to coax into tax compliance those wayward taxpayers who have committed criminal acts or have been remiss in fulfilling their civic tax-filing obligations. Historically, the voluntary disclosure program has had to strike a difficult balance between being attractive enough to entice tax scofflaws to participate and not being too attractive lest ordinary taxpayers feel that their compliance efforts were for naught.

A unique feature of the voluntary disclosure program is that it is entirely administrative in origin. The commissioner …

Puff, Puff, Tax: Internal Revenue Code Section 280e Penalizes State-Sanctioned Marijuana Companies And Undermines The Ability-To-Pay Principle, Joseph E. Thomas

Villanova Law Review (1956 - )

No abstract provided.

Federal Income Taxation, Nikolai Karetnyi, Ruoxi Zhang

Mercer Law Review

In the year 2020, the federal courts within the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit handed down several notable opinions on federal tax issues.1 This Article surveys two of those opinions involving the taxation of conservation easements and the receipt of settlement payments.

Collecting Medical Debt Through South Carolina's Setoff Debt Collection Program: How It Works And Why It Doesn't, Dixie N. Mccollum

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reframing Taxigration In The Search For Tax Justice, Jacqueline Lainez Flanagan

Journal Articles

The Search for Tax Justice is a Tax Notes State series examining the inequities inherent in state and federal taxes. In this installment, Jacqueline Laínez Flanagan, associate professor of law and director of the University of the District of Columbia’s David A. Clarke School of Law Tax Clinic, discusses tax challenges faced by immigrants and responds to myths about the undocumented taxpayer community.

Ground Zero: The Irs Attack On Syndicated Conservation Easements, Beckett G. Cantley, Geoffrey C. Dietrich

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

On June 25, 2020, the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) announced a settlement initiative (“SI”) to certain taxpayers with pending docketed cases involving syndicated conservation easement (“SCE”) transactions. The SI is the current culmination of a long series of attacks by the IRS against SCE transactions. The IRS has recently found success in the Tax Court against SCEs, but the agency’s overall legal position may be overstated. It is possible that the recent SI is merely an attempt to capitalize on leverage while the IRS has it. Regardless, the current state of the law surrounding SCEs is murky at best. Whether …

Creating Opportunity Through A Fairer Tax System, David Gamage

Public Testimony by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Ingenious Biden Tax Plan, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In this article, the author considers the Biden administration’s Made in America Tax Plan, which would overhaul the corporate and international tax provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and represents a long-overdue effort to more fairly tax U.S.-based multinationals.

Tax Benefits, Higher Education And Race: A Gift Tax Proposal For Direct Tuition Payments, Bridget J. Crawford, Wendy C. Gerzog

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article combines three topics--taxes, higher education, and race--to evaluate the tax system's role in exacerbating racial inequalities. Part II frames the discussion with a brief overview of the economics of higher education: how much it costs, how much debt the average student incurs to afford it, and how that debt burden varies by race. Part III describes the major income and wealth transfer tax benefits for higher education, including I.R.C. § 2503(e)'s exclusion of direct tuition payments from gift tax. Part IV demonstrates how this gift tax exclusion disproportionately benefits white families already more likely to avail themselves …

The Surprising Significance Of De Minimis Tax Rules, Leigh Osofsky, Kathleen Delaney Thomas

Washington and Lee Law Review

De minimis tax rules—rules that eliminate tax burdens for low-income taxpayers or low-dollar transactions—abound in the tax law. Despite the prevalence of such rules, legal scholarship has treated them as—well—de minimis, or as mere rounding errors that do not merit sustained attention. This perspective is understandable. If de minimis rules address insignificant taxpayers or tax liabilities, aren’t the rules themselves likely to be insignificant?

Recent tax law developments have revealed that this conception of de minimis tax rules is deeply misguided. Major allocations of tax law liability, as well as accompanying questions about the fairness, efficiency, and administrability of the …

Tax Administration And Racial Justice: The Illegal Denial Of Tax Based Pandemic Relief To The Nation's Incarcerated, Leslie Book

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Implications For Australian Businesses Of Recent Developments In Us State Taxation Of Online Cross-Border Sales, Walter Hellerstein

Popular Media

Although there is no broad-based national consumption tax in the United States, 45 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, as well as thousands of local jurisdictions, impose general retail sales taxes. For the twelve-month period ending in September 2020, sales taxes yielded USD 333 billion or 31.1 per cent of state tax revenues.

The US Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. dramatically expanded the US states’ power to require remote suppliers to collect taxes on in-bound sales to local consumers. The decision repudiated the pre-existing, judicially created constitutional rule limiting the states’ …

Tax Incentives For Green Burial, Victoria J. Haneman

Nevada Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Federalizing Tax Justice, Reuven Avi-Yonah, Orli Avi-Yonah, Nir Fishbien, Hayian Xu

Articles

The United States is the only large federal country that does not have an explicit way to reduce the economic disparities among more and less developed regions. In Germany, for example, federal revenues are distributed by a formula that takes into account the relative level of wealth of each state (the so-called Finanzausgleich, or fiscal equalization). Similar mechanisms are found in Australia, Canada, India, and other large federal countries. The United States, on the other hand, has no such explicit redistribution. Each state is generally considered equal and sovereign, and the federal government does not distribute revenues to equalize …

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 …

Political Justice And Tax Policy: The Social Welfare Organization Case, Philip T. Hackney

Texas A&M Law Review

In addition to valuing whether a tax policy is equitable, efficient, and administrable, I argue we should ask if a tax policy is politically just. Others have made a similar case for valuing political justice as democracy in implementing just tax policy. I join that call and highlight why it matters in one arena—tax exemption. I also further that discussion by arguing that politically just tax policy does the least harm to the democratic functioning of our government and may ideally enhance it. I argue that our right to an equal voice in collective decision-making is the most fundamental value …

The Baby And The Bathwater: Reflections On The Tcja’S International Provisions, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In this article, the author considers how the international provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act could be improved.

A ‘No Exceptions’ Tax System For The 21st Century, Stephen G. Marks

Faculty Scholarship

With a new administration come new opportunities. Here I present a tax proposal that I believe could garner support on both sides of the aisle. It has elements of the negative income tax, first proposed by conservative economist Milton Friedman; the flat tax (also called the “fair tax”), supported by many conservatives; and a universal basic income, promoted by Democrat Andrew Yang, combined in a way that is of the utmost simplicity. Call it the “No Exceptions Tax” (NExT). NExT is a federal personal income tax that replaces the current one. Here’s how it works

Is Gilti Constitutional?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In this article, Avi-Yonah argues that the global intangible low-taxed income regime may be an unconstitutional attempt to tax the foreign-source income of foreign entities, and he offers an alternative.

#Audited: Social Media And Tax Enforcement, Michelle Lyon Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

With limited resources and a diminished budget, it is not surprising that the Internal Revenue Service would seek new tools to maximize its enforcement efficiency. Automation and technology provide new opportunities for the IRS, and in turn, present new concerns for taxpayers. In December 2018, the IRS signaled its interest in a tool to access publicly available social media profiles of individuals in order to “expedite IRS case resolution for existing compliance cases.” This has important implications for taxpayer privacy.

Moreover, the use of social media in tax enforcement may pose a particular harm to an especially vulnerable population: low-income …

Bankruptcy, Taxes, And The Primacy Of Irs Refund Offsets: Copley V. United States, Michelle Lyon Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

The Bankruptcy Code and the Internal Revenue Code (I.R.C.) are statutory labyrinths of federal law. Copley v. United States called on the Fourth Circuit to resolve a question that arose when respective provisions of each collided. At the heart of Copley was a married couple seeking a fresh start with an expected $3,208 income tax refund. The Copleys wished to resolve their outstanding debts in bankruptcy and maximize the relief afforded to them under the Virginia homestead exemption provision, as permitted by the Bankruptcy Code. On the other side of the proverbial table was the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) armed …

A Salt Cap Workaround That Works? Notice 2020-75, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

In November 2020, after the election was over, in form at least, the Treasury and the IRS issued Notice 2020-75, announcing that proposed regulations will be issued governing the treatment of new state laws that impose income taxes on what are passthrough entities for federal income tax purposes. Those laws are clearly intended to provide a way to circumvent the cap on the deductibility of state and local taxes (SALT) included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, and the Notice is very taxpayer friendly in its understanding of these arrangements. This article considers the particulars and the …

Developments Affecting Intercollegiate Athletics And Taxation, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

Developments affecting whether some college athletic teams will be subject to the unrelated business income tax (UBIT) continue and may be accelerating. This article describes the relevant events over the past decade or so, and focuses on new rules generally permitting college athletes to benefit financially from marketing their names, images, and likenesses (NILs), and on the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston. Alston wasn’t a tax case, but what the Court said about the application of the Sherman Antitrust Act to the NCAA’s limitations on providing college athletes with education-related benefits seems to call …

When Can Taxpayers Invoke The Substance-Over-Form Doctrine?, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

This article considers the circumstances under which taxpayers can disavow the form of a transaction they enter in order to claim better tax consequences based on the substance of the transaction. In some situations, the disavowal is noncontroversial because the Internal Revenue Service has blessed the transactions. In a few situations where the Service resists, however, taxpayers are sometimes successful anyway. The focus of the article is on the Tax Court’s 2021 decision in Complex Media, Inc. v. Commissioner, and substantial discussion is devoted to the Third Circuit’s well-known, and sometimes controversial, 1967 decision in Commissioner v. Danielson.

News Flash: Pay Your Federal Income Taxes; The Sixteenth Amendment Was Properly Ratified, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

The idea got around years ago—and it’s still around in tax-protester circles—that the Sixteenth Amendment wasn’t properly ratified and therefore that no legal obligation exists to pay federal income taxes. Wrong! The Amendment process was sloppy, but nothing happened that calls the legitimacy of the Amendment into question, particularly since the relevant officials considered the ratification issues in 1913, when the Amendment was formally adopted.

The Impact Of Particular Provisions Of The 2017 Tax Cuts And Jobs Act On The United States Economy Amidst The Covid-19 Pandemic, Hillary Obinna Maduka

LL.M. Essays & Theses

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is the most significant overhaul of the U.S. federal tax system in the last two decades. This paper seeks to discuss some of its most significant provisions and examine their overall impact on the U.S. economy, especially throughout the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

This paper begins by undertaking an overview of the legislative history of the Act and then proceeds to discuss three provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts which have had a tremendous impact on the U.S. economy by altering some major provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code of 1986. …