New Taxes For COVID-19 Measures And The Role Of Trust

Erick Lachapelle (Montreal; Google Scholar), Thomas Bergeron (Toronto & Montreal, Google Scholar), Richard Nadeau (Montreal; Google Scholar), Jean-François Daoust (Edinburgh; Google Scholar), Ruth Dassonneville (Montreal; Google Scholar), & Eric Belanger (McGill; Google Scholar), Citizens' Willingness to Support New Taxes for COVID-19 Measures and the Role of Trust:

The COVID-19 public health pandemic saw governments spend trillions of dollars to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus as well as to soften the economic blow from the shutting down of national economies. Subsequent budget shortfalls raise the question of how governments will pay for the direct and indirect costs associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we study the public’s willingness to contribute through paying a new tax. We find that both generalized social and political trust are associated with a greater willingness to support a COVID-related tax and that generalized social trust in particular attenuates the negative effect of an experimentally manipulated, specified level of tax burden on policy support. 

Continue reading

Pittsburgh Tax Review Publishes New Issue

The Pittsburgh Tax Review has published Vol. 18, No. 2 (2021):

• Yariv Brauner (Florida; Google Scholar), Thinking Like a Source State in a Digital Economy, 18 Pitt. Tax Rev. 225 (2021)
• Diane Ring (Boston College; Google Scholar), The 2021 Corporate Transparency Act: The Next Frontier of U.S. Tax Transparency and Data Debates, 18 Pitt. Tax Rev. 249 (2021)
• Susan C. Morse (Texas; Google Scholar), The Quasi-Global GILTI Tax, 18 Pitt. Tax Rev. 273 (2021)
• Tracy A. Kaye (Seton Hall) & Michel De Wolf (UCLouvain & ULiège), Corporate Tax: Renewed Fiscal Federalism in the USA, the EU, and Globally for the 21st Century, 18 Pitt. Tax Rev. 301 (2021)

Continue reading

The All Events Tests In An Era Of Self-Regulation

Glenn Walberg (Vermont), The All Events Tests in an Era of Self-Regulation, 12 Wm. & Mary Bus. L. Rev. 329 (2021):

Accrual-method taxpayers must use the all events tests to account for rights and liabilities under contracts for sales of goods and services. These longstanding tests evolved from transactions that involved relatively straightforward exchanges of goods or services for payments, and the tests currently reflect an expectation that a taxpayer will usually make an accrual when a seller’s performance fixes the contracting parties’ respective right to and liability for payment. Business practices have changed such that many sales now occur in relationships where contracting parties assume, monitor, and enforce process-related obligations, including adoptions of codes of conduct by members of global supply chains.

Continue reading

Inequality Of Wealth Ownership And The Problem Of Perpetuities Repeal

Kent D. Schenkel (New England), Inequality of Wealth Ownership and the Problem of Perpetuities Repeal: A Review of Eric Kades, of Piketty and Perpetuities: Dynastic Wealth in the Twenty-First Century (and Beyond), 60 B.C. L. Rev. 145 (2019):

Thanks in part to the French economist Thomas Piketty, it is no longer a secret that wealth ownership globally, and in the United States perhaps most strikingly, is highly skewed, with a very small number of persons owning the vast majority of capital. The findings set out by Piketty in his enormously popular book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, are of particular interest. In his blockbuster tome, Piketty pointed out that when the rate of return to capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, capital becomes dominant. Further predicting that rates of growth are very likely to be less than returns to capital going forward, Piketty concluded that inheritance, not work, will largely determine who gets what in the future. In light of Piketty’s findings and predictions, can we afford to be sanguine about jurisdictions eliminating their Rules Against Perpetuities?

Eric Kades, in his article entitled Of Piketty and Perpetuities: Dynastic Wealth in the Twenty-First Century (and Beyond), answers this question with a resounding “no.” Rather, writes Kades, “we should mourn the RAP’s death.”

Continue reading

Hasen Presents Forget (Arguing About) Redistribution Virtually Today At Florida

David Hasen (Florida; Google Scholar) presents Forget (Arguing About) Redistribution virtually at Florida today as part of its Summer Virtual Workshop Series:

Reformers often argue that the benefits of ameliorating inequality are worth the cost in reduced economic efficiency that supposedly results from redistributive social policy. This paper suggests that these arguments are mostly misplaced. Focusing solely on the marginal benefit of government- versus private-sector spending, there is ample reason to conclude that many governmental expenditures directed to reducing inequality are independently justifiable on the basis that they increase efficiency, even as they also reduce inequality. Because the efficiency argument directly addresses concerns that might otherwise counsel restraint in redistributive programs, treating the reduction of inequality as a worthwhile tradeoff against efficiency is mostly counterproductive from a social policy perspective. Reformers instead should engage proponents of economic efficiency on their own terms. In making this argument, the paper develops the concept of “budget policy endogeneity,” or the idea that the affordability or not of various programs must take into account the allocative and distributional effects of current spending on the future allocation of wealth, since revenue for current projects may be raised in the future.

Continue reading

Designing Nonrecognition Rules Under The Internal Revenue Code

Fred B. Brown (Baltimore), Designing Nonrecognition Rules Under the Internal Revenue Code, 24 Fla. Tax Rev __ (2021):

Nonrecognition rules are a prominent feature of the income tax laws and are a source of considerable complexity and tax planning. Included among the nonrecognition rules contained in the Internal Revenue Code are provisions applying to like kind exchanges, corporate formations, corporate reorganizations, parent-subsidiary liquidations, and partnership formations and distributions.

The policies that arguably support the nonrecognition rules include the familiar trio of tax policy concerns—efficiency, equity, and tax administration. None of these policies, however, provide a strong basis for most of the nonrecognition rules as currently formulated. The efficiency case generally lacks evidentiary support. The equity case is complicated by the fact that the rules operate in a second-best world where the tax base deviates from economic income. And the tax administration argument for the rules, while plausible in theory, is compromised because nonrecognition frequently occurs where there are no valuation and liquidity concerns as a result of the receipt of publicly traded property or the presence of related cash sales.

Continue reading

Lesson From The Tax Court: A Lesson Of Interest

We worked through Spring and Winter, through Summer and through Fall,
But the mortgage worked the hardest and the steadiest of us all.
It worked on nights and Sundays, it worked each holiday,
Settled down among us and it never went away.

-Ry Cooder, “The Taxes on The Farmer Feeds Us All,” Into The Purple Valley (1972)

Today’s lesson is the taxpayer version of that famous Depression-era song: the accumulation of interest on tax liabilities is relentless, and difficult to reverse.  In Kannarkat P. Verghese et al. v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2021-70 (June 7, 2021) (Judge Gustafson), the taxpayers were assessed a deficiency in 2014 for their tax years 1997 and 1998, as a result of over 13 years of audit and litigation between the IRS and three partnerships in which the taxpayers held an interest.  The taxpayers promptly asked for most of the accumulated interest to be abated per §6404.  They diligently pursued that request through 7 years of administrative and judicial proceedings.  Finally, last week, the Tax Court largely upheld the IRS’s refusal to abate the interest, teaching us our lesson.  The lesson cost these taxpayers over $80,000 in accrued interest (on liabilities of $54,000).  Not to mention attorneys fees.  But you can learn this lesson for free.  Just click on "continue reading..." 

Oh, and we also get a bonus lesson on §6603.  Apparently no one told these taxpayers they could suspend the running of interest by making a deposit in the nature of a cash bond.  Whoops.

Continue reading

The Top Five New Tax Papers

There is quite a bit of movement in this week's list of the Top 5 Recent Tax Paper Downloads, with a new #1 paper and a new paper debuting on the list at #5:

1. [490 Downloads]  International Effective Minimum Taxation — Analysis of GloBE (Pillar Two), by Joachim Englisch (University of Muenster)
2. [304 Downloads]  International Tax Law and its Influence on National Tax Systems, by Craig Elliffe (University of Auckland; Google Scholar)
3. [292 Downloads]  Can Blockchain Revolutionize Tax Administration?, by Orly Mazur (SMU; Google Scholar) (reviewed by Sloan Speck (Colorado; Google Scholar) here)
4. [287 Downloads]  The Allocation of Taxing Rights under Pillar One of the OECD Proposal, by Aitor Navarro (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Google Scholar)
5. [256 Downloads]  Winners and Losers: U.S. Country and Industry Estimates of Pillar One Amount A, by Lorraine Eden (Texas A&M; Google Scholar)

Monroe: Improvisation And Forgotten Taxpayers In Partnership Tax

Andrea Monroe (Temple), Making Tax Law Work: Improvisation and Forgotten Taxpayers in Partnership Tax, 54 U. Mich. J.L. Reform  ___ (2021):

The most troublesome provisions of partnership tax are also its most fundamental, namely the allocation rules that regulate how partners share a partnership’s taxable items.

Complexity is a universal problem faced by partnerships at all levels of wealth, status and sophistication, and the vast majority of taxpayers respond with improvisational tax compliance. In remarkably diverse contexts, improvisation has replaced technical compliance as the norm in partnership allocations. Wealthy partnerships make a strategic choice to improvise, using “target allocations,” while poorer partnerships improvise because they have no other choice, routinely following “intuitive” tax law and hoping for the best.

Reframing this complexity problem as a shared experience of all partnerships exposes the technical and cultural fractures of partnership tax in a new and different light.

Continue reading

Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Layser Reviews Woodcock's Antimonopolism As A Symptom Of American Political Dysfunction

This week, Michelle Layser (Illinois; Google Scholar) reviews Ramsi A. Woodcock (Kentucky; Google Scholar), Antimonopolism as a Symptom of American Political Dysfunction.

One of the biggest news stories of the year has focused on antitrust cases and bills targeting tech giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. Outside the academy, liberal progressives increasingly point to monopoly power held by BigTech as a source of growing income and wealth inequality (see here, here, and here).  Newly appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission and Columbia Law Professor Lina Khan made a splash in 2016 with her Yale student note, which made a legal case for breaking up Amazon, inspiring a “‘hipster antitrust’ movement among young scholars who want to expand existing antitrust law to better target issues like corporate concentration and income inequality” (Vox).

But is antitrust law really a promising tool for redistributing income and wealth? Professor Ramsi A.Woodcock doesn’t think so.

Continue reading

Next Week's Virtual Tax Workshops

Monday, June 21: David Hasen (Florida; Google Scholar) will present Forget (Arguing About) Redistribution virtually at Florida as part of its Summer Virtual Workshop Series. If you would like to attend, please contact Charlene Luke.

Friday, June 18: Stefan Hammerl (Graz) & Lily Zechner (Graz) will present Taxing Profit and Consumption in Market Jurisdictions: Equity and Administrability in the Digital Era virtually as part of the Indiana|Leeds Summer Zoom Tax Workshop Series. If you would like to attend, please contact Leandra Lederman or Leopoldo Parada.

Continue reading

Liscow Presents The Psychology Of Taxing Capital Income Today At The Indiana|Leeds Summer Zoom Tax Workshop Series

Zachary Liscow (Yale; Google Scholar) presents The Psychology of Taxing Capital Income: Evidence from a Survey Experiment on the Realization Rule) (with Edward Fox (Michigan; Google Scholar)) (reviewed by David Elkins (Netanya) here) virtually today as part of the Indiana|Leeds Summer Zoom Tax Workshop Series hosted by Leandra Lederman (Indiana) and Leopoldo Parada (Leeds):

How to tax capital income is a critical issue today. The realization rule—requiring that property usually must be sold before gains are taxed—is central to taxing capital income, but often decreases the efficiency, equity, and simplicity of the tax system. Estimates suggest that the realization rule costs the government over $2 trillion over 10 years. Given these problems, it is unclear why the rule exists for assets that are easy to value and sell. Scholars have long speculated about the role of the public’s views here, but little is known empirically about them. We conduct the first survey experiment to understand the psychology of the realization rule, which has broad implications for the taxation of capital income. We have three main findings.

Continue reading

Getting Down To Brass Tax: Why Courts Should Use Equitable Tolling To Help Taxpayer-Petitioners Impacted By COVID-19

Hannah Fisher (J.D. 2021, Chicago), Getting Down to Brass Tax: Why Courts Should Use Equitable Tolling to Help Taxpayer-Petitioners Impacted by COVID-19, 2021 U. Chi. Legal F. ___:

The COVID-19 pandemic caused some of the sharpest rises in American unemployment and poverty seen in a generation. This left people with less money in their pockets, but also less time and access to resources to diligently pursue their legal rights and remedies. Congress responded by providing some financial aid via stimulus packages. But without accompanying procedural relief from various filing deadlines, many will face financial liabilities to the government they otherwise might not, particularly in the tax context. This Comment advocates for greater flexibility when taxpayer-petitioners miss filing deadlines due to COVID-19-related hardships.

Continue reading