Taxation-Federal Commons^™

Access To Tax Injustice, Francine J. Lipman

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Costly Mistakes: Undertaxed Business Owners And Overtaxed Workers, Lily Kahng, Mary Louise Fellows

Faculty Articles

This Article advocates fundamental changes in the federal income tax base by systematically challenging conventional understandings of consumption and investment. As signaled by its title, "Costly Mistakes," this Article's thesis has to do with the disparate treatment of expenditures incurred by business owners and workers. Where the current tax law treats a business owner's expenditure as investment, the Article sometimes finds consumption and questions why the law should allow the expenditure to be deducted. Where the tax law treats a worker's expenditure as consumption, the Article sometimes finds investment and questions why the law does not allow at least a …

Taxing Privacy, Hayes R. Holderness

Law Faculty Publications

In the United States, many low-income citizens are being held to a harsher standard than wealthier citizens — these low-income citizens are being asked to relinquish their privacy in order to obtain the public assistance they need, whereas wealthier individuals are not subjected to similar levels of public scrutiny for government benefits that they claim. Giving up privacy can have devastating effects on individuals’ lives — they may suffer various dignitary harms, may experience repressed abilities to express themselves, and may even be coerced into important life decisions by the government. This situation presents a unique problem to the neediest …

Filing Status And Today's Families, Erik Baines

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taxation, Risk, And Portfolio Choice: The Treatment Of Returns To Risk Under A Normative Income Tax, John R. Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Many articles in the legal and economic literature claim that a pure Haig-Simons income tax cannot effectively tax investment income. This is because an investor can use leverage to gross up her investments in risky assets such that the increased gain (or loss) exactly offsets any income tax (or deduction) on the returns to risk-taking. This article argues, however, that while it is possible for an investor to make such portfolio shifts, she almost certainly will not because of the increased risk of doing so.

Central to any discussion of the effects of taxation on investment risk-taking is the meaning …

Corporate And International Tax Reform: Proposals For The Second Obama Administration (And Beyond), Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The passage of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (ATRA) offers an opportune moment to consider proposals for corporate and international tax reform. With the debate over individual tax rates for the income and estate tax settled for the present, the President and Congress are free to consider broader reforms. Few observers doubt that such reforms are sorely needed, for several reasons. First, the long-term budgetary outlook is unsustainable. Second, the U.S. corporate tax rate is the highest in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). Third, the current system raises relatively little revenue and large amounts of …

Enforcement As Substance In Tax Compliance, Leandra Lederman, Ted Sichelman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

It is well known that the government's complete failure to enforce a law can nullify that law. But what are the effects of partial enforcement? This Article shows that imperfect enforcement can alter the de facto content of the written law in predictable and beneficial ways. Specifically, in the tax compliance context, even if perfect enforcement were costless, it would not always be socially optimal. When improving the substantive law is infeasible, the enforcement agency can effect beneficial changes in the law by adopting a probabilistic enforcement scheme that varies according to the category of taxpayer and type of transaction. …

On The Future Of Tax Salience Scholarship: Operative Mechanisms And Limiting Factors, David Gamage

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Essay — written for Florida State University’s symposium on the 100th anniversary of the U.S. federal income tax — evaluates how the literature on tax salience should be advanced in order for it to better guide tax policy over the coming decades. The literature on tax salience analyzes how taxpayers account for the costs imposed by taxation when the taxpayers make decisions or judgments, both in the taxpayers’ roles as voters and as market participants. This Essay evaluates both possible operative mechanisms that might underlie observed tax salience effects and limiting factors that might prevent tax salience effects from …

Section 7433'S Statute Of Limitations: How Courts Have Wrongly Turned A Taxpayer's Exclusive Sword Into The Irs's Shield Against Damages, Diana Leyden

Faculty Articles and Papers

Over twenty years ago, Congress took the extraordinary step of authorizing taxpayers to sue the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) for damages if the IRS engaged in “unauthorized collection action” when trying to collect a federal tax debt. For many years the IRS has generally been immune from any private action by three laws. Thus, fashioning a private cause of action against the IRS for damages was an extraordinary act. Congress expressly authorized taxpayers to bring a private cause of action against the United States for economic damages caused by “unauthorized collection.” Codified as section 7433 of the Internal Revenue Code, …

Tax Abuse According To Whom, Shannon Weeks Mccormack

Articles

In 1996, Congress banned the Treasury Department from enacting retroactive regulations but provided an important exception, allowing tax regulations to apply retroactively “to prevent abuse.” Congress did not, however, explicitly define abuse; nor did it designate to any specific actor the power to do so. This Article provides the first comprehensive look at the level of deference owed a Treasury regulation’s interpretation of the Internal Revenue Code’s abuse exception. Generally, a reviewing court owes some level of deference to an agency’s interpretation of the statute it is entrusted to administer. Some statutory interpretations are entitled to receive the strong standard …

And Yet It Moves: A Tax Paradigm For The 21st Century, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

A central premise of tax scholarship of the last thirty years has been the greater mobility of capital than labor. Recently, scholars such as Edward Kleinbard have recommended that the US adopt a variant of the 'dual income tax' model used by the Scandinavian countries, under which income from capital is subject to significantly lower rates than labor income because of its supposedly greater mobility. This article argues that the premise upon which this argument is built is mistaken, because for individual US taxpayers (as opposed to corporations), there are significant limitations on their ability to avoid tax by moving …

Extending The Taxation-Of-Risk Model To Timing Options And Marked-To-Market Taxes, Eric D. Chason

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Embracing The Queen Of Hearts: Deference To Retroactive Tax Rules, James M. Puckett

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s decision in Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research v. United States underscored the importance of a uniform approach to judicial review of administrative action; accordingly, the Court clarified that tax administration is generally subject to the same review as other kinds of administrative action by other federal agencies. Tax guidance from the IRS and Treasury Department serves an important role in clarifying the tax law so that taxpayers may report their tax liability accurately and plan their affairs. Meanwhile, aggressive attempts by a relatively small number of taxpayers to avoid tax liability by exploiting arguable ambiguities …

The Corporate Income Tax: United States Of America Report, Henry Ordower

All Faculty Scholarship

In the context of a European project describing variations in the structure of the corporate income tax, this paper briefly describes the United States corporation income tax and contextualizes it within the broader category of business entity taxation. The paper identifies the various tax models that the United States uses for business entities and discusses the historical delinking of limited liability protection for owners and managers from traditional double taxation.

Navigating Tefra Partnership Audits In Multi-Tiered Entity Structures, Mary A. Mcnulty, Robert D. Probasco, Lee S. Meyercord

Faculty Scholarship

The Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA) established a unified procedure for determining the tax treatment of partnership items at the partnership level rather than the partner level. Although these rules addressed a serious and real administrative problem in the assessment of partnership level deficiencies, they also created a complex process with many new problems and potential traps. One particularly unique set of challenges arises in the context of multi-tiered entities.

Multi-tiered entities are partnerships that have a partnership or other pass-through entity as a partner. The pass-through partner is commonly referred to as a “tier,” and …

Tax Incentives For Innovation In A Modern Ip Ecosystem, Joshua Chao

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

Technological innovation is a long-recognized catalyst for economic growth in the United States, and its promotion is an important feature of national economic policy, as evidenced by the presence of various tax incentives for innovation in the US Internal Revenue Code. Tax incentives are an important means by which governments can deliver subsidies to promote such innovation. To be effective, however, any system of tax incentives must be tailored for current economic conditions and competitive landscapes. In the current ecosystem of innovation in the United States, this means that, at the very least, the incentives for innovation in the US …

Hong Kong's Economic Freedom And Income Inequality, Emmett Choy

CMC Senior Theses

Hong Kong is considered to be the most economically free country in the world, but also has the highest amount of income inequality of any developed country. The Hong Kong government is able to sustain laissez faire policies due to its monopoly on land supply. Maintaining high property values allows the government to maximize revenue from property tax, which acts as a hidden tax. A major contributor to income inequality is the formation of oligopolies in Hong Kong that creates an anticompetitive environment. The interests of the government and oligarchs are aligned as both obtain significant portions of revenue from …

The Broken Safety Net: A Study Of Earned Income Tax Credit Recipients And A Proposal For Repair, Sara Sternberg Greene

Faculty Scholarship

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is the largest federal antipoverty program in the United States and garners almost universal bipartisan support from politicians, legal scholars, and other commentators. However, assessments of the EITC missed an imperative perspective: that of EITC recipients themselves. Past work relies on largely unconfirmed assumptions about the behaviors and needs of low-income families. This Article provides a novel assessment of the EITC based on original data obtained directly from 194 EITC recipients through in-depth qualitative interviews. The findings are troubling: They show that while the EITC has important advantages over welfare, which it has largely …

A Changing Federal-State Balance In Unemployment Insurance?, Christopher J. O'Leary

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Will The Federal Income Tax Have A Bicentennial?, Lawrence A. Zelenak

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.