Category Archives: Tax Law

U.S. Tax Policy and Puerto Rico’s Fiscal History

Jul 5, 2016 Shu-Yi OeiTax Law

Shu-Yi Oei

Puerto Rico faces a host of public finance woes. It owes over $70 billion in public sector debt. On May 2, 2016, it missed a major debt payment to its Government Development Bank bondholders. Congress is currently considering legislation that will allow Puerto Rico to restructure its debts. Without debt restructuring, further defaults seem inevitable. Puerto Rico has attempted to use its tax laws to ease its public finance problems. However, in March, the United States District Court for the District of Puerto Rico ruled in Wal-Mart Puerto Rico v. Zaragoza-Gomez that an increased tax imposed by Puerto Rico on certain cross-border, related-party property transactions violated the U.S. Constitution and the Federal Relations Act. The court acknowledged that the tax was implemented to quickly raise revenue to ameliorate Puerto Rico’s fiscal challenges, but it struck down the tax nonetheless. As of this writing, Puerto Rico’s fiscal future remains uncertain.

Puerto Rico’s economic and fiscal condition and its tax policy are, of course, related, and the United States has played an important role in both. But what exactly is the United States’ economic relationship with Puerto Rico? What do U.S. tax and fiscal policies with respect to Puerto Rico tell us about that relationship? And how have these policies influenced the economic trajectory of the island? Tax aficionados may be broadly familiar with tax incentives for investment in Puerto Rico, but what deeper story lies beneath?

Diane Lourdes Dick takes up these questions in her article entitled U.S. Tax Imperialism in Puerto Rico. The article develops a theory of U.S. tax imperialism, which I understand to be a subset of economic imperialism, by detailing the ways in which U.S. tax policy has been used to control the economic trajectory of the territory for the benefit of the mainland. Continue reading "U.S. Tax Policy and Puerto Rico’s Fiscal History"

Don’t Delegate This Reading

Jun 15, 2016 Kim BrooksTax Law

Kim Brooks

In modern regulatory states, the theoretically firm lines dividing the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government are increasingly blurred. Teasing out how to design and enforce effective regulation has become a major preoccupation of scholars and policymakers in every area of law.

Delegating Tax, an article by the talented James R. Hines Jr. and Kyle D. Logue, is wonderful reading in that light. The article contrasts the reluctance of Congress to delegate the lawmaking authority of the IRS and Treasury in the tax area with Congress’ increasing willingness to delegate that authority to other federal administrative agencies. The authors make the case for great delegation in the tax area, noting the potential for the executive branch to draw on greater expertise and to respond more quickly. Continue reading "Don’t Delegate This Reading"

Putting a Face to International Tax Avoidance

May 20, 2016 Andrew HayashiTax Law

Andrew Hayashi

The world of international tax avoidance is a colorful one. There are the legal structures, with names like the “Double Irish Dutch Sandwich,” the exotic locales, like Bermuda and the Cayman Islands, and the identity crises presented by “hybrid” entities and financial instruments. But rarely does international tax avoidance have a human face and one could be forgiven for getting the impression that falling effective corporate tax rates are as inevitable as water flowing downhill. Corporations, acting in the interests of their shareholders, maximize their after-tax profits. States, acting in the best interests of their residents, set tax policies that are incongruous with the policies of other states. The “bad actors,” if there are any in this story, are corporate aggregates of one sort or another, multinational corporations and tax haven countries.

But the LuxLeaks scandal has given us one human face that stands out from the crowd of aggregates. This is the face of Marius Kohl or “Monsieur Ruling,” the former head of the Luxembourg agency, who gave rulings to taxpayers on the tax treatments of their proposed transactions. In The State Administration of International Tax Avoidance, Omri Marian does a wonderful job of explaining how this one bureaucrat acted to facilitate massive tax avoidance by engaging in “arbitrage manufacturing.” Marian argues that rogue individuals pose an ongoing threat to international tax cooperation. His paper clearly explains how arbitrage can be manufactured, documents how it was done in Luxembourg, and draws from the LuxLeaks episode an important lesson about the need to integrate micro reforms of tax administration into the macro project of international tax harmonization efforts. Continue reading "Putting a Face to International Tax Avoidance"

It’s Time To Revisit The Tax Treatment of Working Childcare Costs

Apr 20, 2016 Kathleen DeLaney ThomasTax Law

Kathleen DeLaney Thomas

Childcare costs have soared in recent years while wages remain stagnant. To make matters worse, relief by provided by the tax code is extremely limited. Parents may be able to claim a tax credit for a portion of their childcare costs and may be able to divert limited funds to a pretax flexible spending account. But in many cases, these tax benefits capture only a minor portion of parents’ costs. It is no surprise, then, that with an election year upon us, a number of proposals to expand the current childcare tax credit have resurfaced in recent months. These proposals echo years of debate over whether the tax system discourages work by secondary earners and treats working parents unfairly vis-à-vis their non-parent counterparts.

But current proposals to modestly expand the childcare credit will make only a small dent in working parents’ childcare costs. Recognizing the inadequacy of such an approach, Shannon Weeks McCormack proposes a more fundamental reform in her forthcoming article, Over-Taxing the Working Family: Uncle Sam and the Childcare Squeeze. The childcare tax credit, she argues, should be replaced with an above-the-line deduction for childcare expenses that is not subject to phase-outs or dollar limitations. In essence, Weeks McCormack calls for according childcare expenses the same treatment as deductible trade or business expenses. Continue reading "It’s Time To Revisit The Tax Treatment of Working Childcare Costs"

Widening the Critical Tax Lens

Mar 23, 2016 Bridget J. CrawfordTax Law

Bridget J. Crawford

The road to same-sex marriage was paved with a tax decision. In United States v. Windsor, 133 S. Ct. 2675 (2013), the United States Supreme Court recognized that same-sex spouses, like different-sex spouses, have the right to pass assets to each other tax-free at death. In arriving at that decision, the Court invalidated the portion of the Defense of Marriage Act that provided that the word “marriage,” for federal purposes, meant only a legal union between a man and a woman. With Windsor, a same-sex marriage that was valid for purposes of state law would be recognized for purposes of federal law. In a tax sense, Windsor put same-sex couples and different-sex couples on equal footing for federal purposes. Many commentators accurately predicted that the Windsor case laid the foundation for the Court’s recognition two years later of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (2015).

In the wake of the Windsor and Obergefell decisions, some tax scholars have drawn important attention to legal issues created in the period between Windsor and Obergefell for same-sex couples whose states did not recognize their marriages, as well as challenges faced by those who choose civil unions over marriage. Other tax scholars are wary of Obergefell’s glorification of marriage as the highest form of human fulfillment, and are skeptical that marriage is the correct foundation for a variety of procedural and substantive rules. Continue reading "Widening the Critical Tax Lens"

What is Tax Scholarship, and Who Decides?

Feb 24, 2016 Adam RosenzweigTax Law

Adam Rosenzweig

I typically begin my Federal Income Tax course discussing how tax is the one area of law that touches every aspect of life, from birth to death, from marriage to divorce, from retirement to child-care, and everything in between. Similarly, tax scholars write on topics ranging from same-sex marriage and the earned income tax credit, on the one hand, to carried interest and corporate inversions, on the other. By this point, my colleagues are surely tired of hearing me repeat how tax law has something meaningful to say about everything.

Given this incredible breadth and diversity of the tax law, why is it that most people think of tax scholarship primarily as number-crunching, or business planning, or law and economics? While I happen to be sympathetic to this point of view, primarily because it happens to coincide with my primary interests, why is it so often considered the standard for the best of tax scholarship? Continue reading "What is Tax Scholarship, and Who Decides?"

Tax Havens and the Rise of Inequality

Jan 25, 2016 Omri MarianTax Law

Omri Marian

Tax literature is bitterly divided on the role that tax havens play in global economy. The negative view of tax havens paints them as parasitic, poaching revenue from other jurisdictions. The positive view suggests that tax havens facilitate low-cost capital mobility, mitigating some of the distortive effects of taxation.

To date, this extensive scholarly debate has produced very little information on tax havens themselves. This is hardly surprising, since tax havens are well known to be secrecy jurisdictions. This aspect of tax havens forces scholars who write about them to resort to financial modeling or available country data – data which is rarely on point. Zucman’s book is a unique breed in this context. In order to address the role of tax havens in global economy, Zucman actually collects and interprets the necessary data. Zucman assesses the wealth held in tax havens based on a long lasting anomaly in public finance: that in the aggregate, more liabilities than assets are recorded on national balance sheets, as if a portion of global assets simply vanishes into thin air, or as Zucman put it: “were in part held by Mars.” Zucman meticulously collected macro-economic data of multiple jurisdictions, and discovered that roughly the same amount of assets missing from national balance sheets shows up as ownership interest in investment pooling vehicles (such as mutual funds) organized in tax havens. Continue reading "Tax Havens and the Rise of Inequality"

Regulatory Gray Areas, Uncertainty, and “Human Equity”

Jan 8, 2016 Shuyi OeiTax Law

Shuyi Oei

There has been a growing literature of late discussing how higher education should be funded and by whom, and Benjamin Leff and Heather Hughes make an important contribution to this conversation. One of the key questions currently being debated is whether equity-based models of higher education funding, such as income share agreements and human capital contracts, are viable and ought to be considered more seriously. It is here that Leff and Hughes interject, proposing a derivative instrument they call an “income-based repayment swap” (IBR swap) as a new equity-based method of funding legal education. The Leff-Hughes proposal is innovative and, though it poses some problems, may in fact be viable. What is more interesting, though, is the fact that they propose it at all and what this tells us about the state of the “human equity” market and its relationship to law and regulation.

Some background is in order: Since Milton Friedman and Simon Kuznets first discussed the notion in 1945, economists and others have floated the idea of the “human capital contract,” an instrument that would allow investors to provide capital to individuals in exchange for a percentage of that individual’s future earnings, in essence allowing individuals to issue a sort of equity interest in themselves. From Yale’s “tuition postponement program” of the 1970s to Portland’s “IPO Man” to athlete-tracking stocks to arrangements between baseball players and the buscones who represent them, the markets have dreamed up a number of variations on the human equity theme. Continue reading "Regulatory Gray Areas, Uncertainty, and “Human Equity”"

Exploring the “How” of Tax Legislation

Dec 14, 2015 Kristin HickmanTax Law

Kristin Hickman

Much of tax scholarship—past and present—focuses on the “what” of taxation: the substantive content of the tax laws, and what that content is or ought to be. As Leigh Osofsky recently observed in a delightful series of posts on PrawfsBlawg (see here, here, here, here, and here), a growing trend in tax scholarship considers tax administration, which one might describe as the “how” of taxation, or at least part of it. A separate, but related, strain of tax scholarship concerns the “how” of taxation from a different perspective, that of the tax legislative process. Two recent articles published last year offer interesting insights into this aspect of taxation: Michael Doran’s Tax Legislation in the Contemporary U.S. Congress, and Rebecca Kysar’s The ‘Shell Bill’ Game: Avoidance and the Origination Clause.

Doran styles his article as an update of our understanding of the tax legislative process. He describes the old process as a tug-of-war between “tax instrumentalism,” with Congress “us[ing] the Internal Revenue Code to pursue nontax economic and social objectives” and cluttering up the Code with “particularistic provisions setting out narrow rules and exceptions for specific constituents and interest groups,” and “tax reform,” with Congress repealing those instrumentalist provisions. Doran posits that, since the late 1980s, gridlock has become the norm. (Pp. 555-556.) At the same time, he suggests that “major items of tax legislation” adopted during that period are “strikingly ‘clean’—that is, nonparticularistic.” To support this proposition, Doran looks at 25 years of “major tax legislation,” listed in a handy table. He documents a decline in the length of tax legislation and draws from that admittedly “very rough proxy”—in addition to his own impressions—that contemporary tax legislation is simply less particularistic than in the past. Continue reading "Exploring the “How” of Tax Legislation"