Avi-Yonah: Moore Questions Than Answers

Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar), Moore Questions Than Answers, 180 Tax Notes Fed. 2256 (Sept. 25, 2023):

The revelation that Charles Moore was a director in KisanKraft, the Indian controlled foreign corporation at the heart of the Moore case, throws significant doubt on the story told by the Moores in their court filings. ... Their story is that Charles Moore met Ravi Agrawal when they were both working for Microsoft in 1991, that Ravi founded KisanKraft in 2006 with the Moores as minority (11 percent) shareholders, and that since then Ravi lived in India and ran KisanKraft while the Moores were hapless passive investors. ...

Moore, with its $40,000 investment and $14,000 tax liability, was tailor-made to be a vehicle for a constitutional challenge to section 965. Clearly, the Moores are more sympathetic plaintiffs than the mega corporations who make up most of the taxpayers affected by section 965. I would guess that the number of individual investors affected by that section was smaller than the number of multinationals, and that their total tax liability was a minute fraction of the $340 billion raised by the mandatory repatriation tax, which would have to be refunded if section 965 is held unconstitutional.

It would be a pity if the Supreme Court focuses only on small individual investors like the Moores, and not on the actual, very large taxpayers targeted by the mandatory repatriation tax.

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• Christopher Cox (Former Rep. (1989-2005) & SEC Chair (2005-2009)) & Hank Adler (Chapman), The Ninth Circuit Upholds A Wealth Tax (Jan. 30, 2023)
• Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan), If Moore Is Reversed, 179 Tax Notes Fed. 2215 (June 26, 2023)
• John Brooks (Fordham) & David Gamage (Indiana), Moore v. United States and the Original Meaning of Income (June 27, 2023) (reviewed by Michelle Layser (San Diego) here)
• Daniel Hemel (NYU), The Low And High Stakes Of Moore, 180 Tax Notes Fed. 563 (July 24, 2023) (reviewed by Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo) here)
• Alex Zhang (Emory), Moore, Eisner v. Macomber, and the Future of Structural Tax Reform, 92 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. __ (2024) (Aug. 29, 2023)
• Thomas Lee (BYU), Lawrence Solum (Virginia), James Cleith Phillips (Chapman) & Jesse Egbert (Northern Arizona), Moore, Corpus Linguistics, And The Original Public Meaning Of The Sixteenth Amendment (Sept. 14, 2023)
• Christopher Hanna (SMU), Moore, The 16th Amendment, And The Underpinnings Of The TCJA’s Deemed Repatriation Provision (Sept. 28, 2023)
• Joint Committee on Taxation, Tax Code Provisions Implicated In Moore (Oct. 5, 2023)
• Natasha Sarin (Yale), The Supreme Court Tax Case That Could Blow A Hole In The Federal Budget (Oct. 7, 2023)
• John Brooks (Fordham) & David Gamage (Indiana), “From Whatever Source Derived”: The Sixteenth Amendment and Congress’s Income Tax Power