Category Archives: Tax Law
Apr 10, 2018 Kim BrooksTax Law
Some of my favourite tax scholarship steps outside technical detail and speaks to how tax systems promote or are informed by higher-order values. So, I welcome Shirley Tillotson’s magnificent and richly researched new book on the era between the enactment of Canada’s federal income tax law in 1917 and its heady 1960s reform period, which saw taxpayer-citizens actively debating the contours of democracy through the vehicle of tax reform. At its heart, the book is about what we can learn about democracy from our engagement with taxation and how our democracy can be enhanced when we find ourselves talking about taxes over coffee.
A historian could learn a lot about tax history from reading iterative drafts of legislation, department of finance notes, house of commons debates, and parliamentary committee reports: indeed, some have. Tillotson doesn’t take those as her starting place. Instead, she is interested in how “real people” engage with the tax system and its reform. For her book, she culled through thousands of letters between taxpayers and tax authorities. The letters were mined from the records of the Department of Finance and the Department of National Revenue, in the papers of prime ministers, finance ministers, opposition leaders, and tax officials. Continue reading "Canadians Can Be Unruly, See For Yourself"
Mar 1, 2018 Kathleen DeLaney ThomasTax Law
For those interested in understanding taxpayer compliance—including what motivates taxpayers to report honestly and how to reduce tax evasion – there is a robust body of empirical and legal literature. A number of economists and lawyers have examined the effect of traditional deterrence mechanisms like audits and penalties, as well as non-economic factors like social norms, guilt, taxpayer attitudes about how their tax money is spent, and other psychological factors. While this growing body of literature provides a rich description of the myriad of factors that influence tax compliance decisions, our understanding of taxpayer behavior is far from complete, and further study continues to be necessary. In expanding our understanding of taxpayer motivations, one revealing but possibly overlooked resource is the IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service (“TAS”), which each year publishes a number of empirical studies and other reports relevant to tax compliance. The authors of TAS studies are uniquely situated in that they have access to IRS tax return data, which should provide the best evidence of how taxpayers make decisions in the real world.
As part of the Taxpayer Advocate’s most recent Annual Report to Congress, the TAS published Audits, Identity Theft Investigations, and Taxpayer Attitudes: Evidence from a National Survey (the “Report”). The Report surveyed 2,729 Schedule C filers, that is, taxpayers reporting income from self-employment. Of this group, roughly half (1,363) had been previously audited and half (1,366) had not. One of the primary goals of the Report was to examine how audits influence taxpayer attitudes and behavior. While several of the findings are predictable and consistent with other research on audits, three of the Report’s findings are quite surprising. Continue reading "What Do Audits Teach Us About Tax Compliance?"
Jan 25, 2018 Omri MarianTax Law
Over the past several years, a series of leaks related to offshore tax avoidance and evasion (SwissLeaks, LuxLeaks, the Panama Papers, Bahama Leaks, and Paradise Papers, to name a few) has fueled calls for tax transparency. To date, most discussion of the leaks has been policy-oriented (leaks: good or bad?) and largely anecdotal (based on some truly outrageous revelations). It was not until very recently, however, that a small group of researches started delving into the data exposed by these leaks to make statistically significant empirical findings. Alstadsæter, Johannesen & Zucman’s (AJZ) paper is an excellent example of such paper, which combines methodological sophistication, public data, and leaked data, to make important new contributions to the voluminous literature on the offshore tax world.
Matching leaked data with data from random audits in Scandinavian countries, public wealth records in those countries, and data from voluntary disclosure programs, AJZ find that offshore tax evasion (meaning, the act concealing income from tax authorities in offshore accounts), is not evenly distributed across wealth groups. Rather, they demonstrate that “the probability to hide assets offshore rises sharply with wealth, including within the very top groups of the wealth.” Continue reading "What We Now Know We Didn’t Know about Tax Evasion (and Why it Matters)"
Dec 5, 2017 Charlotte CraneTax Law
The Dwindling Taxable Share Of U.S. Corporate Stock, written by Steven M. Rosenthal and Lydia S. Austin, analyzes the available data regarding the ownership of corporate stock in the United States. Over the history of the income tax, most business capital has been invested in corporations, so an assumption that the income taxation of business meant income taxation of corporations was a reasonable assumption. Similarly, most owners of domestic capital were assumed to be taxable individuals.
One could, therefore, use as a starting point for any reform proposal, the idea that a corporation would be taxed at the stated corporate rates and would make distributions of earnings to individuals who would be taxed at the stated individual rates. Rationalization of business taxation has often aimed at eliminating the incentive to engage in business investment other than through corporate entities. This rationalization (or “integration”) using these standard assumptions about the nature of corporate holdings, involves pushing the corporate tax out to shareholders (by effectively reducing rates when corporate income is distributed), or pushing the individual tax into corporations (by effectively reducing the rate on dividends received). Continue reading " Who Gets Taxed When a US Corporation Pays Dividends?"
Nov 7, 2017 Diane RingTax Law
Michael Hatfield,
Cybersecurity and Tax Reform, 93
Ind. L.J. (forthcoming Spring 2018) available at
SSRN.
The international tax arena is awash with calls for tax transparency, and a variety of reforms are underway at the national, regional and global level to bring such transparency to fruition. See, e.g., Joshua Blank’s recent article The Timing of Tax Transparency, reviewed by Omri Marian earlier this year. Of course, with great caches of information comes great potential for security breaches of all types. Michael Hatfield, in his forthcoming article, Cybersecurity and Tax Reform, draws attention to the immensely important cybersecurity risks and challenges of a tax system founded on government collection and use of significant quantities of information. Quoting a former FBI Assistant Director, Hatfield describes IRS taxpayer information as “the gold standard” for being a “treasure trove of information” from the perspective of cyber criminals—large quantities of very valuable data housed in one agency. Is the IRS ready? Maybe not.
Hatfield’s solution to these cyber risks (given the operational demands of running a tax system and the constraints faced by the IRS) is substantive law reform and not merely more security. To be clear, security is a great idea, but at some point, reality must step in and when it does, Hatfield argues that it points to a remedy grounded in tax design and not just cybersecurity. His bold proposal—to have the tax system collect less data—relies on the marriage of substantive law changes and a rethinking of the sources of data security. Continue reading "Cybersecurity and Tax Information: A Vicious Cycle?"
Oct 18, 2017 Leigh OsofskyTax Law
Heather Field,
A Taxonomy of Tax Loopholes, 55
Houston L. Rev. (forthcoming 2018), available at
SSRN.
One of the many obstacles in the way of productive governance these days is people talking past each other. In the tax context, for instance, everyone seems to agree that we need to “simplify” the tax system and eliminate “tax loopholes.” But, people with very different agendas mean very different things when they use these loaded terms. And using the loaded terms, without elaboration, interferes with our ability to engage in serious policy conversations.
In A Taxonomy for Tax Loopholes, Heather Field identifies this phenomenon and attempts to push us beyond the “tax loophole” rhetoric. She explores the different ways that the term “tax loophole” is used, provides a framework that is designed to promote more transparent substantive debate, and uses her framework to bring greater clarity to contemporary debates about specific tax issues. While, as Field acknowledges, the term “tax loophole” is not going away any time soon, her approach nonetheless brings refreshing incisiveness to a discourse that is too often clouded by meaningless labels. Continue reading "Beyond the “Tax Loophole” Rhetoric"
Sep 18, 2017 Susan MorseTax Law
Sarah B. Lawsky,
Formalizing the Code, 70
Tax L. Rev. 377 (2017), available at
SSRN.
In Formalizing the Code, Professor Sarah Lawsky offers a glimpse of what might be gained if law were written in formal logic language. It might be written by machine-language specialists attached to Congressional tax-writing committees. It could reduce unintentional ambiguity and complexity. Computers could understand it.
Lawsky takes as her focus a problem she calls definitional scope, defined as “when the Code uses a term but the structure of the Code leaves unclear to what a term refers.” (P. 378.) Definitional scope is about cross-references, and cross-references are one element of the formal structure of the Code. Continue reading "When the Life of the Law is Logic"
Aug 2, 2017 Theodore P. SetoTax Law
The House Republican Blueprint for corporate tax reform would replace our century-old corporate income tax, which we all know and love (or hate), with a “destination-based cash flow tax” (DBCFT), which for many of us remains a mystery. The academic foundation upon which the House proposal is built is a working paper by Alan Auerbach (UC Berkeley), Michael Devereux (Oxford), Michael Keen (IMF), and John Vella (Oxford) (collectively “the authors”), entitled “Destination-Based Cash Flow Taxation.” Given the current turmoil in Washington, it seems unlikely that a DBCFT will be enacted any time soon. Problems with our current system for taxing business income with an international dimension, however, are unlikely to go away on their own. If you want to get up to speed on a radical solution with substantial academic and political support, this paper is an absolute must-read.
The DBCFT has two components: a cash flow tax, which alters the timing and sometimes the substance of includibility and deductibility, and the destination-based “border tax adjustments” that have already found their way (sometimes incoherently) into the popular press. Continue reading "The Most Significant Proposed Change in the History of U.S. Corporate Taxation"
Jul 5, 2017 Kim BrooksTax Law
Allison Christians,
BEPS and the New International Tax Order, 6
BYU L. Rev. (forthcoming, 2017), available at
SSRN.
It’s easy to underestimate the value of a good “what’s up” article. If you’ve been doing that, then you should take a look at “BEPS and the New International Tax Order” for a reminder of their value.
“What’s up” articles are the salve of the academy. They take a rapidly changing field of inquiry or policy space or legal doctrine and they encapsulate the state of play in a way that brings out and makes assessable the highlights.
This line of scholarly work is helpful to folks who have drifted from the area of inquiry and to those who are deeply lost in its weeds. Good what’s up scholarship should be evaluated on three criteria: (1) does the article provide an orienting matrix to the work in the particular area; (2) does it appropriately highlight the aspects of that rapidly changing area in ways that emphasizes what matters and de-emphasizes or ignores matters of little importance (put another way, does it respect the fact that not all developments are of equal importance); and (3) is it a pleasure to read. Continue reading "What’s Up: BEPS and the New International Tax Order"
Jun 2, 2017 Andrew HayashiTax Law
Lily Batchelder,
Accounting for Behavioral Considerations in Business Tax Reform: The Case of Expensing (Feb. 5, 2017), available at
SSRN.
Tax scholarship is interdisciplinary. To evaluate tax policy it helps to know at least a little about economics, a little about philosophy, something about budget processes, and a lot about the dizzying creativity of the marketplace in exploiting loopholes and facilitating tax-advantaged transactions. In her recent article Accounting for Behavioral Considerations in Business Tax Reform: The Case of Expensing, Lily Batchelder shows us that we must add financial accounting and firm (and corporate managers’) behavioral considerations to the mix.
The article evaluates which of three policies, adopted on a revenue neutral basis to replace our current regime of accelerated depreciation, would cause the largest increase in new investment by the corporate sector. The three policies are: expensing of new investments combined with higher statutory corporate rates; lower statutory rates combined with more gradual and economically accurate economic depreciation; and an investment tax credit combined with economic depreciation. Continue reading "Do Taxes Motivate Corporate Managers?"
