Taxation-Federal Commons^™

For Richer Or Poorer: Incentivizing Meaningful Investments In Qualified Opportunity Zones, Monica L. Keo

Seattle University Law Review

The wealth disparity in the United States is nothing new. Many have proposed wealth taxes and higher tax rates for large corporations to address income inequality; however, these proposals have been criticized as tax programs that are difficult to administer. Congress passed the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA) in 2017 and created a new investment vehicle known as the Qualified Opportunity Zone (QOZ). The QOZ program incentivizes private investors to invest their capital gains in exchange for a reduction in capital gains tax. The underlying idea of the QOZ program is to utilize a new tool designed to spur …

Taxing Parents: Welfarist Theories, Shannon Mccormack

Articles

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 …

The Rise Of Law And The Fall Of Circular 230: Tax Lawyer Professional Standards, 1985-2015, Michael Hatfield

Articles

This third article focuses on the two issues that dominated discussions of professional responsibility standards for tax lawyers in the 1985-2015 period: return position standards and tax shelter opinions. It opens with consideration of the ABA’s 1965 opinion providing “reasonable basis” as the standard for undisclosed return positions, and then traces the response to that opinion as the response prods the development of the 1985 replacement with its “realistic possibility of success” standard. The Article documents the extensive interaction between Congress, the Treasury Department, and the tax bar over the next 30 years during which penalties are studied and revised …

Tax Policy And Covid-19: An Argument For Targeted Crisis Relief, Assaf Harpaz

Scholarly Works

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp global economic decline. By the end of 2021, the U.S. government responded to the downturn with record fiscal legislation totaling over $5 trillion, which includes considerable tax relief. Most notably, the U.S. government distributed over $800 billion in three rounds of advanced refundable tax credits (known as recovery rebates, or stimulus checks) to most households. Tax relief has been unprecedented in scale but has often been the product of political circumstances rather than principled policy design. Tax relief thus remains largely undertheorized and politically motivated.

This Article examines the U.S. tax policy response to …

May The Odds Be Ever In Your Favor: How The Tax Cuts And Jobs Act Fortified The Great Wealth Divide, Phyllis C. Taite

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Tax Code Bias And Its Starring Role In Perpetuating Inequalities, Phyllis C. Taite

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Taxing Parents: Welfarist Theories, Shannon Weeks Mccormack

Articles

The Internal Revenue Code (the “Code”) taxes parents inequitably. Couples with a sole earner are under-taxed compared to couples with dual earners or single parents. Previous scholarship has identified these inequities and then argued that this sole earner bias should be eliminated. These arguments, however, have often been incomplete. Simply establishing that an inequity exists does not create a full argument for legal reform. After all, the Code plays favorites all the time. Scholars have traditionally turned to theories of distributive justice when evaluating whether tax preferences are warranted. These theories offer competing visions about the way resources should be …

How The State And Federal Tax Systems Operate To Deny Educational Opportunities To Minorities And Other Lower Income Students, Camilla E. Watson

Scholarly Works

The importance of education cannot be overstated. Education is a core principle of the American Dream, and as such, it is the ticket to a better paying job, homeownership, financial security, and a better way of life. Education is the key factor in reducing poverty and inequality and promoting sustained national economic growth. But while the U.S. Supreme Court has referred to education as "perhaps the most important function of the state and local governments," it has nevertheless stopped short of declaring education a fundamental right guaranteed under the Constitution. As a consequence, because education is not considered a fundamental …

Does Tax Matter? Evidence On Executive Compensation After 162(M)'S Repeal, Gregg Polsky, Brian Galle, Andrew Lund

Scholarly Works

As part of the most sweeping federal tax reform in a generation, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (“TCJA”) radically altered the tax treatment of compensation paid to senior executives of public companies. Prior to the TCJA, payment of such compensation in excess of one million dollars was non-deductible except to the extent the compensation was performance-based. The TCJA eliminated the exception so that all senior executive compensation above one million dollars is now non-deductible regardless of whether it is performance-based or not.

This reform provides a natural experiment to study the role of tax law in influencing managerial pay …

A Major Simplification Of The Oecd’S Pillar 1 Proposal, Michael J. Graetz

Faculty Scholarship

In this report, Graetz suggests major modifications to the OECD’s pillar 1 blueprint proposal to create a new taxing right for multinational digital income and some product sales that would greatly simplify the proposal. The modifications rely on readily available existing financial information and would achieve certainty in the application of pillar 1, while adhering to its fundamental structure and policies.

New York’S Proposed Mark-To-Market Tax Decouples From Federal Tax, Henry Ordower

All Faculty Scholarship

A proposal decouples NY from federal tax computations to tax billionaires on unrealized appreciation. If enacted, the proposal generates basis discontinuities across borders but enhances state revenue and may prove attractive to many states. The article reviews how states seek to enhance revenues and considers issues of cross-border taxation and the fundamental right to travel.

Health Insurance And The Undocumented Immigrant, Anja Diercks

Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to perform a comparative analysis on how seven different countries (USA, South Africa, Germany, England, Canada, France and Singapore) organize their healthcare system to cope with the issue of undocumented immigrants and whether or not these systems in place were “fair.” The thesis will also explore the possible ways the United States could change to be more inclusive and fairer in the world of healthcare and health insurance for the undocumented immigrant. A study on what fairness means both in ethical and economical terms is done to suggest a new basis of a fair …

Coca-Cola: A Decisive Irs Transferpricing Victory, At Last, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Gianluca Mazzoni

Articles

In this article, Avi-Yonah and Mazzoni examine the Tax Court’s decision in Coca-Cola, the first decisive IRS victory in a major transfer pricing case since 1979.

A Letter To The United States Government On Wealth And Income Inequality, Matthieu Maier

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

The United States of America is the world’s hotspot when it comes to income and wealth inequality. The wealthiest Americans are accumulating more and more wealth everyday while most Americans, who fall somewhere around middle-class, remain struggling and stagnant. The United States’ unchecked and deregulated system of capitalism is the root cause of our country’s inequities along with our government’s refusal to set aside self-interests and biases in order to combat these issues. From the inequality caused by rouged American systems larger issues are created that lead to complications in health, wages, standard of living, and race relations within our …

The Rich, Lucas A. Santos

English Department: Research for Change - Wicked Problems in Our World

The rise of the super rich dramatically rose in the 1980’s. The once dominant oil and gas sector was taken over by finance and technology overall. We are able to see a rise of these super rich, or the one percent, and even how quickly they were able to recover from the 2008 Recession. Now, the one percent are making continuous substantial gains in a current world, where a pandemic has struck and many are struggling. I talk about the use of public policy in order to regain this economic gap between the one percent and the rest of the …

Fixing The Johnson Amendment Without Totally Destroying It, Benjamin Leff

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The so-called Johnson Amendment is that portion of Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code that prohibits charities from "intervening" in electoral campaigns. The intervention has long been understood to include both contributing charitable funds to campaign coffers and communicating the charity's views about candidates' qualifications for office. The breadth of the Johnson Amendment potentially brings two important values into conflict: the government's interest in preventing tax-deductible contributions to be used for electoral purposes (called "nonsubvention") and the speech rights or interest of charities.

For many years, the IRS has taken the position that the Johnson Amendment's prohibition on electoral …

Information Matters In Tax Enforcement, Leandra Lederman, Joseph C. Dugan

BYU Law Review

Most scholars recognize both that the government needs information about taxpayers’ transactions to determine whether their reporting is honest, and that third third-party reporting helps the government obtain that information. Given governments’ reliance on tax collections, it would be risky to think that information or third third-party reporting is not needed by tax agencies. However, a recent article by Professor Wei Cui asserts that “modern governments can practice ‘taxation without information.’” Professor Cui’s argument rests on two claims: (1) “giving governments effective access to taxpayer information through third parties does not explain the success of modern tax administration” because, he …

Enough Is As Good As A Feast, Noah C. Chauvin

Seattle University Law Review

Ipse Dixit, the podcast on legal scholarship, provides a valuable service to the legal community and particularly to the legal academy. The podcast’s hosts skillfully interview guests about their legal and law-related scholarship, helping those guests communicate their ideas clearly and concisely. In this review essay, I argue that Ipse Dixit has made a major contribution to legal scholarship by demonstrating in its interview episodes that law review articles are neither the only nor the best way of communicating scholarly ideas. This contribution should be considered “scholarship,” because one of the primary goals of scholarship is to communicate new ideas.

House Oversight Hearing On Tax Avoidance And The Irs, Leandra Lederman

Public Testimony by Maurer Faculty

Professor Leandra Lederman testifimony for the House Oversight Hearing on Tax Avoidance and the IRS, October 13, 2020.

Click the "Download" button to read the text of Professor Lederman's prepared testimony, or view the video of the fulll hearing below.

To view just professor Lederman's testimony, click HERE

Mandatory Tax Penalty Insurance, Michael Abramowicz

Indiana Law Journal

In a mandatory tax penalty insurance regime, taxpayers would be required to find insurers to certify portions of their tax returns. A certifying insurer would be subject to a governmental auditing regime insurers of randomly selected filings would pay an amount equal to the inverse of the selection probability multiplied by the underpayment, or they would receive money from the government in the case of overpayment. The insurers function as private auditors with no incentive to underestimate their customers' tax liability. Such a regime will consume real resources, ultimately paid by taxpayers, and thus should not be imposed universally. But …