Category Archives: Tax Law
Dec 16, 2019 Charlene D. LukeTax Law
Christine Hurt’s Partnership Lost uses the developmental history and law of corporations and “uncorporations” to examine whether a principled justification exists for the differing tax regimes for subchapter C corporations as compared to subchapter K partnerships. As her Milton-evoking title suggests, Hurt describes an early, prelapsarian partnership state, dating to the creation of the income tax. The early partnership form did not spare its owners from personal liability, did not grant them dominion over an entity with perpetual life, did not provide them with the ability to transfer ownership freely, did not permit them to rely passively on the managerial efforts of others, and did not allow them to circumvent fiduciary obligations to each other and to the partnership.
Hurt describes the modern “hybrid” partnership in comparison to this early partnership model. She sets out the developments in the uniform acts and state laws, particularly those of Delaware, that have since allowed partnership hybrids to acquire desirable corporate characteristics, such as limited liability, passive investors, and centralized management, while remaining partnerships for tax purposes. The hybrid partnership, as an “uncorporation,” can avoid certain governance and other requirements. “The backstops against managerial opportunities” applicable to corporations often do not apply. The result is that “[t]he hybrid entity is more corporation-like than the corporation.” Continue reading "Time to Banish Partnership Hybrids from Partnership Taxation?"
Nov 22, 2019 Emily SatterthwaiteTax Law
Margherita Borella, Mariacristina De Nardi, and Fang Yang,
Are Marriage-Related Taxes and Social Security Benefits Holding Back Female Labor Supply?, NBER Working Paper No. 26097 (July 23, 2019), available at
SSRN.
There has been a surge in empirical literature examining gendered patterns of behavior and outcomes across numerous economic contexts, especially choices within and across families. Relatively little of it has focused explicitly on how the basic structure of our tax laws interacts with and influences such choices. Encouragingly, a recent working paper by Margherita Borella, Mariacristina De Nardi, and Fang Yang does exactly that.
Borella, De Nardi, and Yang (BD&Y) study two key policies within the U.S. tax-transfer system: joint income tax filing for married couples and access to Social Security benefits for spouses. The joint income tax filing rule means that a married secondary earner will owe income tax at the marginal rate established by “stacking” her income on her spouse’s income, which generally is a higher rate than would apply if the secondary earner was single. Social Security benefits also increase to account for an earner’s spouse, but do not increase to account for an earner’s unmarried partner. Continue reading "A Do-Over for the Tax Unit"
Oct 23, 2019 Leigh OsofskyTax Law
In recent years, legal scholars have begun to focus in earnest on the realities of the legislative process. Just to name a few topics, this research has included studies about congressional drafting and canons, agency involvement in legislative drafting, how legislative drafting has changed over time, how statutory drafters make discrete drafting decisions, and much more. Understanding these realities is essential to how we use, and make meaning of, the statutes that pervade our legal system.
Jesse Cross’s recently published article, The Staffer’s Error Doctrine, is an important contribution to this body of work. In this article, Cross provides a deep account of how Congress has come to rely upon what Cross calls a “staffer delegation model.” Cross explains that Congress has not always relied so extensively on congressional staff to draft legislation. Rather, Congress previously used a mix of committees and delegation to agencies. Cross argues that concern over executive power, along with expanded internal bureaucracy, has prompted Congress instead to increasingly turn to an army of congressional staffers to draft legislation. As Cross explores, members of Congress have acknowledged that this turn to staffers gives staffers not only clerical tasks, but also significant power to make policy through legislation. And, as Cross persuasively argues, this is a systematic byproduct of a Constitution that creates generalist legislators, notwithstanding a world that increasingly requires subject-matter experts to create good law. Continue reading "Constructing Doctrines for Modern Legislative Realities"
Sep 30, 2019 Kristin HickmanTax Law
Jonathan H. Choi,
The Substantive Canons of Tax Law, 72
Stan. L. Rev. ___ (forthcoming 2020), available at
SSRN.
Jurists and legal scholars who think about methods and approaches for resolving questions of statutory meaning like to talk about traditional tools of statutory interpretation and the metaphorical toolbox in which those tools are kept. Textualism versus purposivism; the relative merits of text, history, and purpose; and the meaning and utility of both semantic and substantive canons are all common fodder for discussion and debate. Adding to the literature at the intersection of statutory interpretation and tax, Jonathan Choi offers an interesting and thorough treatment of why we ought to think of tax anti-abuse doctrines like the economic substance doctrine, the step transaction doctrine, and the assignment-of-income doctrine as substantive canons of statutory interpretation. (Helpfully, Choi provides a nice appendix, including footnotes, in which he catalogues substantive tax canons, including a couple of “not a canon” entries.)
Choi begins his article by surveying all of the reasons we ought to be dissatisfied with the status quo of tax anti-abuse doctrines. Courts and the IRS do not apply tax anti-abuse doctrines consistently. The Internal Revenue Code’s own terms sometimes contradict a particular tax anti-abuse doctrine, for example by requiring form to trump substance notwithstanding the doctrine preferencing substance over form, exacerbating the difficulty. Also, because tax anti-abuse doctrines are purposivist by nature and origin, they do not mix very well with the more textualist approach to statutory interpretation adopted by contemporary courts. Overall, the picture that Choi paints of tax anti-abuse doctrines is one of confusion and inconsistency. Continue reading "Refashioning Anti-Abuse Doctrines As Substantive Canons"
Sep 2, 2019 Charlotte CraneTax Law
In Tax Equivalences and Their Implications, Alan Auerbach reviews some of the commonly invoked equivalences that have been incorporated into the vocabulary of tax policy discussions during the last half-century. He offers a quick (and refreshingly accessible) summary of the analysis economists have used to break down the study of tax instruments so that their predicted impacts can be compared in terms of their overall effect on the economy. More important, he points out the situations in which these generally useful assumptions about equivalence across tax instruments will not hold, and, in doing so, hints that arguments from equivalence may have sometimes played a perhaps oversized role in tax policy discussions.
Equivalence for Auerbach’s purposes generally refers to the idea that identified tax policies have, in his words, “the same impact on fundamental economic outcomes.” One key economic outcome is the extent of the misallocation of resources resulting from the dead-weight losses taxes always entail. Under an economist’s view, for instance, a labor income tax can be seen as equivalent to a consumption tax as long as there is no initial wealth (and therefore earnings are only derived from labor) and all earnings are consumed. Continue reading "What Is Lost in Translation? From Theory to Practice in Tax Policy"
Jul 29, 2019 Susan MorseTax Law
Miranda Perry Fleischer & Daniel Jacob Hernel,
The Architecture of a Basic Income, __
U. Chi. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming), available at
SSRN (Mar. 27, 2019 draft).
Miranda Fleischer and Daniel Hemel have written a terrific article, The Architecture of a Basic Income, about a universal basic income, or UBI. They offer concrete policy advice grounded in philosophical priors. They successfully separate questions about fundamental policy design from questions about political packaging. Their paper should become a go-to resource for the increasing swell of interest in UBI policy.
Fleischer and Hemel give the following definition of UBI: “[A] program that ensures that all members of a polity have access to at least a minimum sum of money.” (P. 6.) They provide three philosophical perspectives that support a UBI: welfarism, founded on the premise of declining marginal utility of income; resource egalitarianism, or the idea that ex ante redistribution should support each individual’s ability to develop; and libertarianism, based on the Lockean proviso that individuals’ acquisition of property rights should leave “enough, and as good,” for others. Continue reading "The Policy Maker’s Guide to a Universal Basic Income"
Jun 26, 2019 Neil H. BuchananTax Law
John Snape and Dominic de Cogan, two legal scholars from universities in England, have provided a significant contribution to the emerging scholarly discussion in many different countries about the nature and limits of the law—not just tax law, which is their nominal domain in this chapter and book, but of all law. Without being at all polemical, and although they give a fair hearing to those with whom they disagree, they make an undeniable case for the claim that the study of tax law is ultimately the study of, to be honest, everything.
Their argument is subtle and nuanced in a number of important ways, but in the end they could not be more clear. Tax laws are, in the point of view to which they adhere, “not exclusively legal and not even exclusively about tax.” (P. 25.) Even detailed tax statutes have “no coherence or morality outside [of a] political and public law context.” (P. 25.) Continue reading "The Law of Taxation Is the Lynchpin of Civilization"
May 21, 2019 Diane RingTax Law
Thomas Piketty’s work brought the reality of unequal distributions of wealth into mainstream media and popular discourse. In the tax world, the conversation now regularly turns to a consideration of whether and how the international tax regime contributes to existing patterns of wealth and income distribution across nations. Certainly, the tax norms and rules that shape the basic roadmap of international tax (including source, residence and permanent establishment provisions) contribute to existing distributions of wealth—and relatedly taxable income—across jurisdictions. Why do these patterns persist? And perhaps more importantly, what would it take for change?
A recent article by Tarcísio Diniz Magalhães aims to develop answers to both questions. That article builds on an active conversation in international tax. In responding to the question, Magalhães argues that the international tax world we see today is the product of a 100 years of tax policy advocacy and design by a subset of nations and actors—and that this subset has maintained a hold on international tax policy norms through a combination of power and expertise. Although the story of developed economies dominating the origins of international tax is not new, Magalhães offers a nuanced argument regarding how these countries have maintained their level of influence in policy design. His weaving of technical tax expertise into a narrative that has typically been cast as a raw power play provides a closer look at the mechanisms by which privileged positions can be maintained. This process of tax law design is, in his view, more important than the substantive outcomes—although the substantive outcomes have been less than ideal from the perspective of many developing countries. Continue reading "A Path to International Tax Reform and Improved Wealth Distribution Across the Globe"
May 1, 2019 Theodore P. SetoTax Law
Dhammika Dharmapala,
The Consequences of the TCJA’s International Provisions: Lessons from Existing Research, CESifo Working Paper No. 7249 (Oct. 31, 2018), available at
SSRN.
The international provisions of the Internal Revenue Code are among its least well understood. Public Law 115-97, known informally as the “Tax Cut and Jobs Act” (TCJA), made significant changes to those provisions. One of the best evidence-based articles exploring the likely effects of those changes is Dhammika Dharmapala, The Consequences of the TCJA’s International Provisions: Lessons from Existing Research, CESifo Working Paper No. 7249, a second version of which was posted on SSRN in late October. In it, Dharmapala reviews the existing econometric literature and uses that literature to project the likely long-term consequences of those changes. Anyone interested in international tax policy will benefit from working through his evidence and conclusions.
Although Dharmapala initially defines his task in broad terms—“to review the most important of these new international tax provisions and to discuss their potential consequences, drawing on existing scholarly literature”—he ultimately narrows his focus to ownership distortions, distortions that implicate what is known in the literature as “capital ownership neutrality.” He does not, for example, explore generally the likely effects of TCJA on incentives to offshore business operations or incentives to income-shift within a consolidated group. Instead, he notes that pre-TCJA, (1) “US MNCs [multinational corporations] [were] disfavored as vehicles for global portfolio investment” and (2) “the US tax imposed upon the repatriation of dividends created an incentive to delay repatriation, and led to the accumulation of cash holdings…in foreign affiliates,” and asks whether the new changes are likely to ameliorate or exacerbate these distortions. Continue reading "An Empirical Assessment of the Likely Impact of the International Provisions of the TCJA"
Mar 21, 2019 Kim BrooksTax Law
- Wei Cui, The Digital Services Tax: A Conceptual Defense (Oct. 26, 2018), available at SSRN.
- Wei Cui & Nigar Hashimzade, The Digital Services Tax as a Tax on Location-Specific Rent (Jan. 23, 2019), available at SSRN.
Proposals from the European Council and the UK governments to introduce a digital services tax (DST) took those of us who haven’t been watching the field as closely as we should have by surprise. A DST might be levied on a revenue base, such as revenue from selling online advertising, intermediary services or data; at a low rate, perhaps 3%; on companies that exceed a size threshold, such as total revenue of 750 million euros. Coming in the wake of a protracted period in which the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development focused on negotiating arguably minor changes to the international tax framework (through the “base erosion and profit split” (BEPS) project), the DST seems to be moving like a high-speed train.
Scholars and policy makers have made efforts to justify (or contest) the normative underpinnings and economic consequences of the DST. In this context, two related papers—one by Wei Cui and Nigar Hashimzade and the second by Wei Cui—offer some helpful and novel analysis. Continue reading "Give the Digital Services Tax a Chance"
