Tax Law Commons^™

Incentivizing Wills Through Tax, Margaret Ryznar

ACTEC Law Journal

There have been recent calls to loosen will formalities in order to allow more people to execute wills, the importance of which has been highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The reduction of necessary will formalities can be successful in expanding the use of wills, as can potential tax incentives for creation of wills, such as a tax credit. However, there are numerous advantages to using tax to initiate change, as considered in this Article.

Silent Trusts Are Trending: Will They Hold Trustees To Account?, Kent D. Schenkel

ACTEC Law Journal

A common intuition is that easy money creates a disincentive to efforts for personal success. Many trust settlors seem to embrace this view but still wish to provide generously for their families. Enter the so-called “silent trust,” which seeks to moderate the disincentive effect by way of trust provisions that limit or waive notice and disclosure requirements to beneficiaries.

But a fundamental tension plagues these trusts. Beneficiaries need basic information about a trust in order to hold trustees to account. Consequently, traditional trust law provides limits on the degree to which trustees can be silent as respects a beneficiary’s right …

House Bill 3: An Iou Texas Public Schools And Communities Of Color Cannot Afford, Candace L. Castillo

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

A history of school finance litigation and legislation shows there are inherent and structural problems in Texas’s education finance system. Like many government and social structures, the Texas school finance system is built to benefit school districts that have greater access to wealth to begin with and creates inequalities between rich and poor populations as well as between people of color and Caucasians. House Bill 3 went into effect in 2019 and promises improvements to “recapture” calculations, increases in certain allotments, as well as salary increases for some Texas teachers. Some changes to education finance were sorely needed such as …

A Sale To A Bidit Should Work As Well As A Sale To An Idit, Michael D. Mulligan

ACTEC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Truth, Transparency, And The Right Of Privacy, Duncan E. Osborne

ACTEC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Front Matter

ACTEC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Investing In And For The Future: Esg Investing For Trust Assets Under The Prudent Investor Rule, Jane Gorham Ditelberg

ACTEC Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Cross-Border Attestation And Interjurisdictional Wills, Richard F. Storrow

ACTEC Law Journal

After nearly two years of difficult effort to contain the coronavirus outbreak, remoteness is firmly embedded in the American psyche. Throughout the country, emergency orders permitting will execution and attestation to be conducted by simultaneous audio-visual transmission have allowed estate planning to proceed. There are currently bills in some state legislatures to make permanent the temporary emergency measures adopted during the pandemic. Remote execution and attestation may be here to stay, even in a world where electronic wills remain rare. This article addresses what is likely to become a more familiar manner of will execution in a post-pandemic world and …

How Big Is Illicit Cigarette Trade In The Philippines?, Myrna S. Austria, Alyssa Cyrielle B. Villanueva

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

Illicit cigarette trade or the manufacture, distribution, and sale of cigarettes that evade taxes and violate trademarks, persists in the Philippines. Enhancing the affordability and availability of cigarettes undermines the effectiveness of the series of tax policy reforms meant to lower, if not eliminate, tobacco use in the country. Worse, it results in a loss in government tax revenues. This Policy Brief presents the estimates and recommends policy actions to address the problem. The results from residual methods provide a strong presence of illicit cigarette trade in the country. The magnitude ranges from 3.3% to 42.8% of total cigarette consumption, …

Domestic Revenue Mobilization Through Corporate Income Tax In An East African Developing Country Context, Afton Titus

Dalhousie Law Journal

The laudable objective of making the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) a reality requires the targeted use of financial resources. It has become imperative for governments to raise such financial resources through mechanisms that facilitate the domestic mobilization of revenues. This paper argues that in an African developing country context, corporate income tax represents the most effective means by which governments may raise the required funds. Corporate income tax remains an important source of revenue for African countries. This paper further proposes: (i) the design of the essential features of a corporate income tax system that properly accounts for the economy …

Origin And Differentiation In International Income Allocation, Ivan Ozai

Dalhousie Law Journal

The present international tax rules are typically justified by origin-based theories. These theories align countries’ tax entitlements with the geographical location of the economic factors that contribute to the creation of income. Two recent phenomena have rendered origin-based approaches limited in scope. First, the economic integration of multinational corporations and the relevance of intangibles have made it infeasible to precisely pinpoint the factors contributing to the generation of income. Second, the growing disputes between countries about which economic factors should be considered relevant for sharing the international tax base have recently led to increased consideration of distributional consequences, thus moving …

International Tax Law Between Loyalty, Exit, And Voice, Tarcísio Diniz Magalhães

Dalhousie Law Journal

Discourse on the merits and pitfalls of multilateral cooperation for advancing justice in international tax law have recently re-emerged in the literature. Some tax scholars, even while criticizing global projects like the OECD/G20 initiatives on base erosion, profit shifting and the tax challenges arising from the digitalisation of the economy, insist that cooperative efforts herald a step in the right direction. Others contest the feasibility of international cooperation or its value for developing countries. Drawing on Albert Hirschman’s oft-cited framework for actor behaviour under institutional malperformance, this article shows that there are three alternatives for those discontented with the status …

Cross-Border Tax Transparency: A Study Of Recent Policy Developments In Turkey, Leyla Ateş

Dalhousie Law Journal

Transnational tax information cooperation has the crucial role of empowering tax administrations to collect tax revenues in full and on time, thereby narrowing the tax gap created by international evasion and avoidance. However, the adequacy of established transnational tax information exchange systems in combatting international tax evasion and avoidance has been severely criticized and a new wave of progress on transparency has started after the 2008 global economic crisis. In this direction, Turkey set cross-border tax transparency high on its political agenda. Though, Turkey has operationalized new transnational tax cooperation agreements very slowly. Furthermore, Turkey’s approach to exchanging information has …

Designing A More Sustainable Global Tax System, Allison Christians

Dalhousie Law Journal

The international tax system incentivizes unsustainable business practices because it ignores the private profits created by externalizing human, societal, and environmental costs. This paper proposes a novel reform: applying living wage and externality assessment tools to the rules for establishing where income arises for tax purposes. To do so, I propose a method that is relatively complex but arguably more accurate (in tax terms) and a complementary but relatively simpler proxy method. I examine how each method would implicate treaty-based and domestic rules and processes and conclude that the proposed design provides a viable starting point to make the global …

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The Taxing Risk When Invoking The Fifth Amendment On A Tax Return, Jacob Hoback

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Divorce Without Marriage: Taxing Property Transfers Between Cohabiting Adults, Keeva Terry

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Qualified Opportunity Funds: Private Equity Exemptions From Public Responsibility, Audrey E. Abate

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

The historic Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), passed and signed into law in 2017, included a pilot program of a new kind of tax advantage: the Qualified Opportunity Zone. The obscure provision has since spawned novel investment vehicles, called Qualified Opportunity Funds, through which qualified individuals and entities participate in what are often significant tax advantages, including deferral of capital gains for up to ten years. Because Qualified Opportunity Funds have come into existence so recently, regulation has been slow to catch up to the ways in which this tax program is rapidly attracting capital from private equity, investment …

Looking For A Silver Lining: How The Covid-19 Pandemic Forced New York To Reckon With Its Affordable Housing Crisis, Daniel Finnegan

Brooklyn Journal of Corporate, Financial & Commercial Law

Since the Great Depression, the United States government has failed to find an adequate remedy to a nationwide housing shortage amongst low- and moderate-income individuals and families. The COVID-19 public health crisis has exacerbated this ongoing, nation-wide housing crisis, and has highlighted the racial inequities present in our housing market. Furthermore, it has pushed New York State’s residential housing market into a uniquely precarious position. Dramatic legislation is required at the state level to address the housing crisis caused by the massive growth in income-insecure and housing-insecure individuals that resulted from the pandemic, as well as the widespread departure of …

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.

Repurposing Pillar One Into An Incremental Global Tax For Sustainability: A Collective Response To A Global Crisis, Jinyan Li, Sophie Chatel

Articles & Book Chapters

This article proposes to repurpose the OECD/IF Pillar One Blueprint from a taxing rights reallocation mechanism into an incremental global tax for sustainability. With a common goal and DST-like feature for simplification, the proposal aims to ease the negotiation of essential and drastic simplifications required to deliver a workable solution.