Category Archives: Tax Law
Aug 10, 2022 Daniel ShaviroTax Law
As the saying ought to go, those who forget history are doomed to miss out on a lot of great stories. In Rebellions, Rascals, and Revenue: Tax Follies and Wisdom Through the Ages, Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod do their formidable best to save us from this dire fate. They also amply fulfill their aim of proving the truth of their opening quotation, from H.L. Mencken, to the effect that taxation is not just “eternally lively” but of greater interest than “either smallpox or golf.”
Keen and Slemrod are also so impressively comprehensive in their self-set task of combing thousands of years of history, across multiple continents, for enjoyable or illuminating tax anecdotes that I started to take it as a challenge. I read a lot of history books on the side. So, could I think of stories worth including that they had left out? Continue reading "Tell Me a Tax Story"
Jul 12, 2022 Neil H. BuchananTax Law
Do the goals of fairness, equity, social justice, or other explicitly normative approaches to analyzing law and policy have any place at all in modern scholarship? Some scholars, especially those who approach the world from an orthodox economic viewpoint, have tended to reject categorically the very idea that such concepts should supplant their purportedly hard-headed analysis–an analysis that they hold out as being superior to supposedly “soft,” “sentimental,” “moralistic,” or “subjective” anti-orthodox approaches. Increasingly, however, equity-based analysis has at least been permitted as a component of most legal scholarly discussions. That itself is progress.
Even so, there continues to be a presumed distinction between self-styled “objective” approaches and the approaches of those who focus on inequality, domination, and other such fundamental questions of social justice. The familiar “equity-efficiency tradeoff” encapsulates this tension, the notion being that there are two distinct analytical categories that are not merely separate but in opposition to each other–-that is, the tradeoff says that we must sacrifice some efficiency if we desire greater equity, or instead that we must agree to doom more people to poverty if we seek to maximize efficiency. But is there a better approach? Happily yes, as Taxation and Law and Political Economy, by Professors Bearer-Friend, Glogower, Jurow Kleiman, and Wallace, clearly suggests. Continue reading "Bringing Law and Policy Back from the Black Hole of Efficiency-Based Analysis: Another Important Step Toward Refocusing on Justice"
Jun 9, 2022 Dorothy BrownTax Law
Professor Goldburn Maynard’s excellent Essay: Biden’s Gambit: Advancing Racial Equity While Relying on a Race-Neutral Tax Code, analyzes the Biden’s Administrations efforts to advance racial equity through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) enacted by Congress and signed into law on March 11, 2021.
The first executive order that President Biden signed once sworn into office was Executive Order No. 13,985, designed to advance racial equity throughout his Administration including various federal agencies. ARPA contains some provisions that exemplify the language and spirit of Executive Order No. 13,985. That set the new Administration on a collision course with the Department of the Treasury (Treasury) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which have both been devoted to the idea of colorblindness when it comes to tax data. The IRS for example does not publish statistics by race, even though it has done so by age and gender. As Professor Maynard points out, Biden Administration efforts also conflicted with federal courts, which similarly operate with a colorblind jurisprudence. In Professor Maynard’s observation, parts of ARPA, such as distributing aid through the tax system, only indirectly and inadequately pursued racial equity goals. Others, such as debt relief for socially disadvantaged farmers or ranchers, were colorblind casualties.
As Professor Maynard points out, racial equity does not rely on equal treatment, but fairness in treatment including access to resources. Racial equity seeks to address historical disparities and minimize or eliminate systemic racism. Continue reading "The Biden Administration’s Racial Equity Challenges"
May 10, 2022 Kim BrooksTax Law
I love everything about this book book, Tax Cooperation in an Unjust World, by Allison Christians and Laurens van Apeldoorn. It’s short, it’s readable, there’s no mystery about the point (and the authors don’t belabour it), and it’s important.
The main claim: our international tax system has justice at its heart. And when we fail to attend to its justice consequences, we enable states with great wealth to “facilitate[] and feed[] off continued human suffering.” (P. 1.) Continue reading "The International Tax System is There to Achieve Justice"
Apr 6, 2022 Adam RosenzweigTax Law
Wei Cui,
New Puzzles in International Tax Agreements,
Tax L. Rev. (forthcoming 2022), available on
SSRN.
The G-7 and G-20 recently announced a “breakthrough” agreement by over 130 countries to adopt and implement a “global minimum tax” proposal. The agreement is reportedly expected to raise over $150 billion in new revenue by closing some of the most notorious tax loopholes in the world; ultimately the deal could reshape global commerce and shore-up beleaguered national finances following the global pandemic. Officials involved in the deal have been quoted as making sweeping statements that the deal was historic, and that it would reshape the global economy, make worldwide taxation fairer, eliminate incentives for corporations to avoid tax, and serve as a clear signal for global justice.
A consistent theme can be seen to emerge from this process – that the cause for most of the problems plaguing the international tax regime ultimately stem from a lack of political will, with global corporate interests exploiting the vacuum of an uncoordinated tax system. Regardless if it is true, such a theme carries with it two collateral implications: (1) there is no disagreement as to the substance of the deal from a legal or policy standpoint and (2) any questioning of (1) must be motivated by the same political forces preventing reform in the past. Wei Cui’s article New Puzzles in International Tax Agreements analyzes and criticizes this theme. Continue reading "Carving a Path for Legal Scholarship During an Existential Crisis"
Feb 25, 2022 Kathleen DeLaney ThomasTax Law
The problem of income inequality is well-documented. And for those who support greater income redistribution, the current state of affairs is bleak. Proposals for a wealth tax or heavier taxation of capital income appear to have stalled, and little progress has been made towards meaningful reform measures that would shrink wealth and/or income gaps.
So what gives? We already know part of the story. Progressive tax proposals, such as mark-to-market taxation, tend to be complex, which in turn makes them harder to sell to politicians and the public. Similarly, reform measures like a wealth tax face criticism that they would be too hard to administer. Yet adding to these problems appears to be a general indifference, if not outright lack of support, from the public. This is puzzling because, given the evidence that only a very small percent of Americans holds most of the nation’s wealth, a lot of people would benefit from wealth or income redistribution. So why isn’t there more popular support for redistributive tax policies? A recent empirical study offers compelling evidence of another major barrier to reform: our irrational, subjective beliefs about where we fall on the income distribution. Continue reading "Why is it So Hard to Reduce the Wealth Gap? Cognitive Bias May Be Partly to Blame"
Jan 26, 2022 Charlene D. LukeTax Law
Andrea Monroe,
Making Tax Law Work: Improvisation and Forgotten Taxpayers in Partnership Tax, 55
U. Mich. J. L. Reform (forthcoming), available on
SSRN.
Andrea Monroe’s article, Making Tax Law Work: Improvisation and Forgotten Taxpayers in Partnership Tax, boldly calls on partnership tax experts to understand their role in normalizing dysfunction within partnership tax law and to support reform that is mindful of all partnerships.
Although millions of business entities are taxed as partnerships, assets and income are concentrated in a small number of them. As Monroe notes, drawing on IRS data from 2018, “less than 1 percent of partnerships held greater than 76 percent of partnership assets, and approximately 73 percent of partnerships held roughly 1 percent of partnership assets.” This suggests great differences among tax partnerships, yet, as partnership income and deductions are taxed to the partners and not the partnership, all tax partnerships must allocate their income and deductions to their owners. Continue reading "Law Over Improvision: A Call to Reform the Culture of Partnership Tax"
Dec 21, 2021 Kristin HickmanTax Law
“Don’t sweat the small stuff” was one of my father’s favorite sayings. It’s the thought that has always come to my mind whenever thinking about, and teaching, de minimis rules in the tax code. De minimis rules keep the IRS from seeming petty, for example by allowing an employer that provides free bagels in the break room from having to report the bagels as income to its employees. De minimis rules also allow taxpayers to avoid complexity and hassle when the dollar amounts at stake are small, for example by permitting taxpayers to immediately deduct many small capital expenditures, rather than having to amortize or depreciate them over several years. In short, I have always thought of de minimis rules as making a hugely complicated tax system just a little easier to navigate, and perhaps just a little kinder. At worst, de minimis rules have always seemed fairly harmless — “the equivalent of rounding errors in the design of the tax law.” Reading The Surprising Significance of De Minimis Tax Rules by Leigh Osofsky and Kathleen DeLaney Thomas has forced me to rethink these long-held intuitions.
Osofsky and Thomas begin their analysis of de minimis tax rules with an overview and a typology of sorts. Functionally, some de minimis tax rules indeed eliminate taxpayer burdens and protect unsophisticated taxpayers from finding themselves ensnarled in complexity. The IRS also benefits in these instances, by avoiding enforcement and other administrative costs. Other de minimis tax rules, however, are simply the result of rent-seeking behavior and benefit only sophisticated taxpayers pursuing complicated transactions. While de minimis tax rules can protect taxpayers from complexity, they also create complexity. And sometimes, de minimis tax rules that seem small turn out not to be so small after all, whether due to unintended consequences or interpretative choices that expand their scope. Continue reading "Perhaps We Should Sweat The Small Stuff"
Oct 22, 2021 Charlotte CraneTax Law
Ruth Mason,
The 2021 Compromise, 172
Tax Notes Fed. 569 (2021), available at
SSRN.
Only a fraction of tax law professors teach the course usually called “international tax.” For the rest of us teaching tax at a law school, the effort that technical competency in international tax requires is unsustainable, especially given the instability of that part of the law that most affects US multinational business. But every tax professor should understand at least a little bit about the ways that international tax law is changing. I recommend reading Ruth Mason’s work, most recently The 2021 Compromise, as a great way to gain competency regarding this evolution.
Mason’s goal in this piece is to contextualize recent developments in the OECD/G20’s BEPS project against the backdrop of her extensive prior work on the subject (see especially The Transformation of International Tax), and to put into perspective the changes currently underway in the international tax space. On July 1, 2021, 130 countries reached agreement in principle to Pillars 1 and 2 of the G20/OECD Base Erosion and Profits Shifting (BEPS) project. Pillar 1 concerns the allocation of taxing authority after the emergence of the digital economy and Pillar 2 is a proposal for a global minimum tax. This two-Pillar OECD project represents a second phase of the G20/OECD work on BEPS. Continue reading "Change in International Tax"
Sep 23, 2021 Leigh OsofskyTax Law
Leslie Book,
Tax Administration and Racial Justice: The Illegal Denial of Tax Based Pandemic Relief to the Nation’s Incarcerated Population, 72
S. Carolina L. Rev. __ (2021), available at
SSRN.
In Tax Administration and Racial Justice: The Illegal Denial of Tax Based Pandemic Relief to the Nation’s Incarcerated Population, Leslie Book tells the remarkable story of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act emergency relief payments and the incarcerated population. In addition to having numerous plot twists and turns, the story underscores an important, underexamined issue: when the government administers the law, it imposes burdens (or frictions) on the public. These burdens may be borne disproportionately by different groups, including along racial dimensions. Anyone interested in agencies, tax administration, or race and the law would benefit from reading Book’s paper.
As Book describes, when Congress passed the CARES Act, it authorized the IRS to pay out economic relief payments of $1,200 (for adults) and $500 (for dependent children) as “rapidly as possible.” The IRS dutifully did so, including by making approximately $100 million in payments to federal, state, and local prisoners by April 2020. However, the IRS then inexplicably reversed course, deciding that prisoners were not eligible to receive the economic relief payments, but not providing any basis or explanation for its reversal. The IRS tried to recover the payments it had previously made to prisoners as allegedly erroneous and issued a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) on the IRS website indicating that any incarcerated individual who had received a payment needed to return it to the IRS. Leiff Cabraser, a public interest law firm, brought a class action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated individuals and eventually won in district court. The court ordered the IRS to change its position regarding prisoners’ entitlement to the payments and ensure that eligible, incarcerated individuals received their payments. Notwithstanding this court victory for incarcerated individuals, difficulties in the IRS’s administrative process prevented many from receiving the payments in 2020, undermining the IRS’s ability to meet Congress’s mandate of making the payments “as rapidly as possible.” Continue reading "Racialized Frictions in Tax Administration"
