Tax Law Commons^™

Narrowing The Tax Gap Through Presumptive Taxation, Kyle D. Logue, Gustavo G. Vettori

Articles

Can the United States government significantly reduce the federal tax gap? This question has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention over the years and has been the focus of numerous government reports. The "tax gap" is the official term for the Treasury Department's estimate of the difference between what American taxpayers should pay to the federal government in a given tax year (that is, the amount of tax they owe, based on a reasonable interpretation of existing tax laws as applied to particular taxpayers' circumstances) and what they actually pay. This estimate is derived from painstaking and detailed audits …

Exclusion From Income Of Compensation For Services And Pooling Of Labor Occurring In A Noncommercial Setting, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

When cash is received for services, it typically will constitute gross income to the recipient.' But what if the payments are made in a noncommercial setting such as the payment by a parent to a child for mowing the lawn or performing household chores? As discussed later in this Essay, there are reasons to conclude that such payments do not constitute income. The problem of how to treat receipts from a noncommercial activity frequently arises in the context of an exchange of services. A similar problem arises when services are provided by several persons pursuant to a pooling of labor …

The History Of Intellectual Property Taxation: Promoting Innovation And Other Intellectual Property Goals?, Xuan-Thao Nguyen, Jeffrey A. Maine

Faculty Publications

An important issue deserving scholarly attention concerns the proper role of the federal tax system in achieving intellectual property law's innovation objectives. The article traces the historic development of the specific tax rules governing intellectual property, identifies present areas of policy dissonance in the intersection of intellectual property and taxation, and calls for an appropriate legal framework for future intellectual property tax legislation.

Happiness In Business Or Law, Peter H. Huang

Publications

This article provides a short introduction to recent happiness research and its applications to business or law that is organized as follows. Section I briefly considers: (1) troubling and not so troubling reservations about happiness research, and (2) how money and happiness are related. Section II concisely surveys two sets of applications of happiness research to business, namely: (1) workplace well-being and meaning, and (2) marketing. Section III succinctly reviews two categories of happiness research implications for law: (1) business regulation, and (2) law student and lawyer happiness.

Doing Too Much: The Standard Deduction And The Conflict Between Progressivity And Simplification, John R. Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In U.S. federal income tax, the standard deduction, along with the personal exemptions, provides taxpayers with a minimum amount of untaxed income, effectively creating a "zero bracket amount." For historical and political reasons, however, the standard deduction also operates as a simplified substitute for the itemized deductions, such as the deductions for extraordinary medical expenses, charitable contributions, and home mortgage interest. This seemingly reasonable compromise in fact leads to substantial, and surprising, conceptual complexity. In particular, close analysis of each of the two roles shows that their effects, and related criticisms, are often contradictory, which in turn makes it difficult, …

The Post-Tarp Movement To Regulate Banker Pay, Eric D. Chason

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Investment Income Withholding In The United States And Germany, Lily Kahng

Faculty Articles

In a reversal from its historical roots, the United States income tax system now taxes income from labor significantly more heavily than income from capital. It does so not only facially, through explicit preferences for income from capital, but also more subtly, through more hidden features of the tax system – specifically, enforcement strategies. This article focuses on a prominent disparity in enforcement between the two forms of income: Wage income is subject to withholding while investment income is not.

In its critical examination of this disparity, the article first offers a brief history of withholding in the United States, …

Tax Lawyers, Tax Defiance, And The Ethics Of Casual Conversation,, Michael Hatfield

Articles

This essay is to help tax lawyers decide how to handle casual conversations centered on denying, defying, or destroying the tax system. One option is to walk away, ending the conversation and silencing the dialogue. The next option is to engage. I want to persuade tax lawyers that they should usually engage in the conversation. I try to do this in Part III.

There are two kinds of legal ethics essays, and one must choose which kind to write, and it is useful to the reader to know upfront which kind the author chose to write. One kind begins with …

Summaries From The 26th Annual Tei-Sjsu High Technology Tax Institute, Ankit Mathur, Zhihua Cai, Tim Kelly, Marja Mirkovic, Sampada Deshmukh, Ami Shah

The Contemporary Tax Journal

No abstract provided.

An Equity-Based, Multilateral Approach For Sourcing Income Among Nations, Fred B. Brown

All Faculty Scholarship

The source of income rules used in the United States and elsewhere in large part establish the contours of tax jurisdiction exercised by countries. The source rules play a vital role in the foreign tax credit system applicable to U.S. persons with foreign investment or business activities. The source rules also play a central role in the United States’ exercise of source taxation over foreign persons with U.S. businesses or investments. Other countries likewise use source rules or their equivalent in applying foreign tax credit or territorial systems to their residents and exercising source taxation over nonresidents.

The current approach …

Price Includes Tax: Protecting Consumers From Tax-Exclusive Pricing, Hayes R. Holderness

Law Faculty Publications

This Note contributes to the debate regarding the behavioral effects of the salience of taxes on taxpayers by examining the impact of including the value of sales taxes in the displayed prices of goods. The Note concludes that consumers should make more beneficial decisions regarding consumption when the value of sales taxes is included in or with displayed prices.

Too Close To Home: Limiting The Organizations Subsidized By The Charitable Deduction To Those In Economic Need, Shannon Weeks Mccormack

Articles

The charitable deduction allows taxpayers to deduct amounts donated to organizations pursuing statutorily designated purposes from their otherwise taxable income. By lowering the after-tax cost of giving and encouraging taxpayers to donate more than they otherwise would, the charitable deduction subsidizes a broad variety of organizations. Some of these organizations provide widespread societal benefits, while others provide narrower benefits that remain closer to the taxpayer-donor’s home. To evaluate these current laws, this Article focuses on efficiency criteria, which limit subsidized organizations to those with donor support that does not cover the costs needed to optimally provide goods and services. Existing …

Taxation Of Financial Products: Options For Fundamental Reform, Alex Raskolnikov

Faculty Scholarship

The following is testimony to the joint hearing of the House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means and the Senate Committee on Finance. The testimony discusses three benchmarks for evaluating the taxation of capital income in general and financial instruments in particular, summarizes three broad-based approaches to reforming the tax treatment of financial products, evaluates the impact of other fundamental reforms on the urgency of reforming the taxation of derivatives, and urges Congress to encourage the IRS to make detailed tax return data available for empirical research of revenue costs and other losses arising from derivatives-based tax planning.

Can Joe The Plumber Support Redistribution? Law, Social Preferences, And Sustainable Policy Design, Gillian Lester

Faculty Scholarship

How does one win popular support for laws designed specifically to redistribute economic wealth? One can hardly gainsay that this is a – perhaps the – defining issue for domestic policy in the age of President Obama. Even as the recent financial crisis has exposed the need for a reliable social safety net, attempts to respond through the political and legislative arenas have triggered increasingly hostile responses among conservatives, populists, Massachusetts voters, and incipient tea partiers. The puzzle of how to attract and preserve public support for law reform aimed at redistribution – of both income and risk – is …

Two Paths For Developing Anti-Avoidance Rules, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

The author discusses the administration of anti-avoidance rules in China, and puts forth the argument that anti-avoidance rules are being applied in China not only in the absence of the rule of law, but also parallel to the rule of law. He suggests that Chinese taxpayers and tax administrators collectively have the choice of pursuing discussions about the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate tax planning along two paths the rule of law figures as an important norm, while in the other it t, and he discusses how each works in China.

The Tax Consequences Of Corporate Reorganisations In China, Wei Cui, Richard Krever

All Faculty Publications

The story of China’s income taxation of corporate reorganisations falls into four distinct periods. The first years of the development of a market economy were a period of benign neglect as tax authorities came to grips with a new tax system and some domestic taxpayers exploited unintended exemptions for reorganisation transactions. A dialectic emerged during the second period of reform with a shift towards a more conventional company tax system based on widely-accepted normative tax principles, while at the same time concessional rules were enacted for transactions favoured by the economic planners. The third stage saw a winding back of …

Winn And The Inadvisability Of Constitutionalizing Tax Expenditure Analysis, Edward A. Zelinsky

Articles

No abstract provided.

China: A New (Furtive) Approach To Taxing International Transportation Income, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

Donghwa Industrial Corporation v. Weihai Huancui State Tax Bureau: China's New (Furtive) Approach to Taxing International Transportation Income

Suitable For Framing: Business Deductions In A Net Income Tax System, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

The federal income tax code includes numerous provisions disallowing or curtailing income tax deductions related to such disparate activities as providing non-performance based compensation to senior corporate executives and business lobbying. The primary claim of this article is that a tendency to mentally frame business deductions as subsidies, often reinforced by rhetoric explicitly framing deductions as subsidies, helps explain these provisions. The traditional “public policy” disallowances directed at lobbying, fines and penalties paid by businesses, and antitrust treble damages respond to an appearance of a taxpayer subsidy that would follow from deduction, despite the fact that it is far from …

What Is The 'Law' In Chinese Tax Administration?, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

In December 2009, in just weeks of proximity to the issuance of several controversial, arguably ultra vires tax circulars by the Ministry of Finance and by the State Administration of Taxation (SAT), the latter agency promulgated a seminal regulation governing informal rulemaking activities of all tax authorities in China. This regulation took effect on July 1, 2010, and promises to significantly improve the clarity, transparency, predictability, and quality of tax rulemaking. Ironically, it can also be seen as a rebuke to a cynical view that is rather prevalent among Chinese tax practitioners and reinforced by the recent problematic tax circulars. …