Brooks Presents The Sixteenth Amendment And The Meaning Of ‘Income’ Today At Columbia

John Brooks (Fordham; Google Scholar) presents The Sixteenth Amendment and the Meaning of "Income" (with David Gamage (Indiana-Maurer; Google Scholar)) at Columbia today as part of its Davis Polk & Wardwell Tax Policy Colloquium hosted by Michael Love:

The upcoming Supreme Court case of Moore v. United States raises questions that the Court has rarely had to address in the last 100 years—what is the meaning of income under the Sixteenth Amendment, and of the Sixteenth Amendment generally? And furthermore, is realization required before the gain from property ownership can be treated as income? And what does realization mean? The taxpayers in Moore (and the Ninth Circuit judges who dissented from the denial of rehearing en banc) argue that realization is necessarily a part of the meaning of “income” in the Sixteenth Amendment—i.e., that there must be some act of separation or conversion of property into cash or other property in order for there to be “income.” They are, in essence, aiming to revive a disputed reading of the discredited 1920 case of Eisner v. Macomber.

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The Limits Of Taxing The Rich

Brian Riedl (Manhattan Institute), The Limits of Taxing the Rich:

Budget deficits have risen to nearly 6% of GDP and are projected to rise to 10% of GDP over three decades. If Congress continues to enact additional tax cuts and spending expansions, these deficits will grow even larger. To close these baseline deficits and finance additional expansions, most progressives reject most spending cuts as well as middle-class tax increases. Instead, just “tax the rich” has become an easy and popular answer. However, while there is surely room to raise some revenue from corporations and wealthy families, the plausible revenue estimates from these proposals fall far short of closing these budget gaps.

This report models an aggressive tax-the-rich agenda that pushes tax rates for corporations and wealthy families toward revenue-maximizing levels. It shows that such policies could raise, at most, 2% of GDP—and likely far less, when accounting for the macroeconomic losses that would result from layering so many new taxes on top of one another. Consequently, a sustainable economic and tax agenda would limit upper-income-tax increases to 1% of GDP.

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Moore, The 16th Amendment, And The Underpinnings Of The TCJA’s Deemed Repatriation Provision

Christopher H. Hanna (SMU), Moore, the Sixteenth Amendment, and the Underpinnings of the TCJA’s Deemed Repatriation Provision, 76 SMU L. Rev. Forum __ (2023):

In Moore v. United States, the Supreme Court will consider a rare Sixteenth Amendment case. On its face, the case deals with deemed repatriation, a discrete provision of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that included in income past accumulated earnings held abroad. This short Article seeks to contextualize the deemed repatriation provision in terms of why it was passed and how it comports with principles underlying the U.S. tax code. Drawing on firsthand experience researching and drafting the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Article shows the analysis that went into enacting the tax, focusing on the traditional elements of tax reform and legislation: equity, efficiency and simplicity.

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Pittsburgh Tax Review Publishes New Issue

The Pittsburgh Tax Review has published Vol. 20, No. 2 (2023):

• Jonathan G. Blattmachr (Pioneer Wealth Partners), How Wealth Transfer Taxes Might Reduce Racial Wealth Disparity in America, 20 Pitt. Tax Rev. 297 (2023)
• Allison Tait (Richmond; Google Scholar), Tax-Free and the Offshore Imaginary, 20 Pitt. Tax Rev. 313 (2023)
• Eric Kades (William & Mary; Google Scholar), One Trust, Two Taxes, 20 Pitt. Tax Rev. 341 (2023)

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Weisbach: Against Anti-Tax Exceptionalism

David A. Weisbach (Chicago; Google Scholar), Against Anti-Tax Exceptionalism, 77 Tax L. Rev. __ (2023): 

This paper examines the arguments found in what has become known as the anti-tax exceptionalism literature. That literature seeks to apply the rules of administrative law to tax procedures. The core claim is that the procedures used by the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury routinely violate the requirements of administrative law. Secondarily, that literature argues that this is normatively bad: the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service should not be treated differently from other administrative agencies because the tax system is not exceptional. Promoting the goals of administrative law, that literature argues, requires that the tax system conform to standard procedures.

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2003-2022 Tax Journal Rankings: Tax Law Review Is #1, Virginia Tax Review Is #2

Following up on yesterday's post, 2022 Tax Journal Rankings: Tax Law Review Is #1, Virginia Tax Review Is #2:  here are the Washington & Lee 2003-2022 tax law review combined rankings of eight major tax journals:

• Columbia Journal of Tax Law ("Columbia")
• Florida Tax Review ("Florida")
• Houston Business & Tax Review ("Houston")
• Pittsburgh Tax Review ("Pittsburgh")
• Tax Law Review ("NYU")
• Tax Lawyer ("ABA")
• Tax Notes Federal ("Tax Notes")
• Virginia Tax Review ("Virginia")

The rankings are based on the annual combined rankings in 2003-2022 among these eight journals by:

• Impact Factor (citations/number of articles published)
• Citations in Law Reviews
• Citations in Cases (federal and state courts)
• Currency (how rapidly articles are cited)

Ave	Journal	22	21	20	19	18	17	16	15	14	13	12	11	10	09	08	07	06	05	04	03
1.6	1. NYU	1	1	3	2	3	3	2	2	2	2	2	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	1
2.5	2. Virginia	2	2	2	4	4	1	1	1	1	1	1	2	2	2	3	4	4	4	4	4
2.8	3. Florida	3	3	1	1	1	2	3	4	3	3	3	4	4	4	4	3	2	2	3	2
3.3	4. Tax Notes	4	5	4	3	2	4	4	3	4	4	4	3	3	3	2	2	3	3	2	3
5.4	5. ABA	6	6	NR	6	NR	5	5	5	5	5	6	5	6	6	6	6	5	5	5	5
7.9	6. Houston	NR	NR	NR	NR	NR	10	9	7	6	6	7	7	7	8	8	9	8	8	9	9
7.9	7. Pittsburgh	NR	NR	NR	NR	NR	8	8	8	7	8	5	6	5	5	5	22	NR	NR	NR	NR
10.1	8. Columbia	5	4	5	5	NR	6	6	10	10	13	14	33	NR	NR	NR	NR	NR	NR	NR	NR

As I have previously noted, Tax Notes fares poorly in the Impact Factor category (citations/number of articles published) because W&L apparently counts as "articles" all of the advance sheet material in Tax Notes Federal.

Tax Notes Federal is #1 by a wide margin in the number of citations in law reviews:

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Kysar Presents The Global Tax Deal And The New International Economic Order Today At NYU

Rebecca Kysar (Fordham; Google Scholar) presents The Global Tax Deal and the New International Economic Order at NYU today as part of its Tax Policy and Public Finance Colloquium hosted by Daniel Shaviro:

The ethos of economic integration and trade liberation no longer reigns supreme. Instead of multilateral trade agreements, nations are turning towards protectionism and unilateralism. Yet in late 2021, nearly 140 countries agreed to a new international tax system that is aimed at levelling the playing field among them, curtailing competition on corporate tax rates and corporate profit shifting to tax havens through a new global minimum tax as well as constructing a new allocation of taxing rights among nations.

Although multilateral trade agreements now seem out of reach, tax multilateralism is ascendant. This is surprising given the deep connection between taxation and national sovereignty. It also perplexing since international tax does not exhibit the same theoretical harmony between national and worldwide welfare that international trade enjoys. The traditional account offered by economists is that trade liberalization is a rising tide that will lift all boats because countries will produce according to their competitive advantages and trade the rest, making trade suitable for international coordination. In contrast, tax is largely described as a zero-sum contest for a fixed pot of tax revenues, deeming it ill-suited for collective action.

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St. Thomas-FL Seeks To Hire A Clinical Tax Prof

St. Thomas University AALS Placement Bulletin Posting:

St. Thomas University Benjamin L. Crump College of Law seeks to hire multiple entry-level tenure-track and lateral faculty members, and invites applications from qualified candidates.

Based on the College of Law’s primary curriculum needs we are especially interested in candidates with teaching, scholarship and research interests in the subject-matter areas of Criminal Law and Procedure, Commercial Law, Contracts, Professional Responsibility, Property, Torts, Wills and Trusts, as well as Appellate Advocacy Clinic and Tax Clinic. ... 

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Call For Tax Papers And Panels: Law & Society Annual Meeting

Neil Buchanan (Florida) has issued his annual call for tax papers and panels for next year's annual meeting of the Law & Society Association in Denver, Colorado (June 6 - 9, 2024):

The Law & Society Association (LSA) will host its next annual meeting from June 6 - 9, 2024, in Denver, Colorado. For the twentieth year in a row (wow), I am organizing sessions for the "Law, Society, and Taxation" group (Collaborative Research Network 31). And for what is now the eighth year in a row, I have the good fortune of working with Professors Jennifer Bird-Pollan and Mirit Eyal-Cohen as co-organizers of our conference-within-a-conference.

Under our signatures below, I've copied the Call for Papers email that LSA sent last week. Note that all sessions in Denver will be entirely live. Like it or not (and I personally like it very much), everything is in-person again.

This year's official conference theme, "Unsettling Territories: Tradition and Revolution in Law and Society," is interesting and might encompass the work that you'd like to present.  Even so, please remember that you are not bound by the official theme of the conference,   We will give full consideration to proposals in any area of tax law, tax policy, distributive justice, interdisciplinary scholarship, and so on.

The deadline for submissions is October 24, 2023 at 5:00pm Eastern Standard Time (USA and Canada, where the "and Canada" part is personally meaningful to me this year, as my signature line below indicates, eh?).

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2022 Tax Journal Rankings: Tax Law Review Is #1, Virginia Tax Review Is #2

Washington & Lee has just released the 2022 tax law review rankings of six major tax journals:

• Columbia Journal of Tax Law ("Columbia")
• Florida Tax Review ("Florida")
• Tax Law Review ("NYU")
• Tax Lawyer ("ABA")
• Tax Notes Federal ("Tax Notes")
• Virginia Tax Review ("Virginia")

The rankings are based on citations to articles published in 2018-2022 (methodology):

• Impact Factor (citations/number of articles published)
• Citations in Law Reviews
• Citations in Cases (federal and state courts)
• Combined (weighted combination of the above rankings)
• Currency (how rapidly articles are cited)

	Combined	Impact	Journals	Cases	Currency
1. NYU	15.26	1.02	164	0	1.81
2. Virginia	12.12	0.8	137	1	1.52
3. Florida	7.69	0.44	115	2	0.80
4. Tax Notes	6.65	0.01	257	0	0.01
5. Columbia	5.88	0.41	57	0	0.73
6. ABA	4.49	0.22	82	2	0.38

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Kemker: When Gender-Affirming Healthcare Becomes Illegal, Will It (Still) Be Tax-Deductible?

Diane Kemker (Southern; Google Scholar), When Gender-Affirming Healthcare Becomes Illegal, Will It (Still) Be Tax-Deductible?, ABA Tax Times, Vol. 42, No. 4, Sept. 2023, p. 13:

We are living in a time of unprecedented legal attacks on the health, safety, and existence of transgender people. These attacks include laws restricting or even prohibiting access to gender-affirming health care, including prescription drugs and surgical treatments. Currently, at least eighteen states have banned gender-affirming care for minors; another twelve are considering similar laws; Missouri’s governor sought to ban gender-affirming care for all ages; and three states (Oklahoma, Texas, and South Carolina) have considered extending the ban to transgender people up to 26 years old. 

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The American Law Institute Centennial And The Future Of Tax Projects

Monte A. Jackel (Jackel Tax Law, Silver Spring, MD), The ALI Centennial and the Future of Tax Projects, 180 Tax Notes Fed. 1483 (Aug. 28, 2023) (reviewing The American Law Institute: A Centennial History (Andrew S. Gold (Brooklyn) & Robert W. Gordon (Stanford) eds. 2023)):

In its centennial book of essays summarizing its 100 years of existence, the American Law Institute and the authors it selected to contribute to the book do a good job describing the various restatements, principles of law, and model codes that form a huge part of the ALI’s legacy. ... 

Not so well known is that the ALI has a long and rich history of engaging in projects involving federal tax. Unfortunately, the federal tax history of the ALI was not separately discussed in the centennial history. It should have been.

ALI Tax History
The ALI’s involvement in federal tax started in the early 1950s, when it engaged in a project relating to partner and partnership taxation as part of the prelude to the Internal Revenue Code of 1954. ... Several studies were published from the late 1950s through the 1970s on various federal income, estate, and gift tax subjects. Then, in or around 1984, there were several extensive studies done by the ALI, again led by the giants of the tax profession at that time, particularly experts in partnership and corporate tax. Those other federal tax studies were in the fields of corporate tax, international tax, estate and gift tax, and income taxation of trusts and estates. Finally, the ALI published a report on the taxation of private business enterprises in 1999. There has been no reported ALI activity on federal tax since 1999.

Discussion
It is my understanding that, after the 1999 project, the ALI leadership may have formed a view that tax legislation was too political and that the organization’s time and money were better spent elsewhere.

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The Tax Lawyer Publishes New Issue

The Tax Lawyer has published Vol. 76, No. 4 (Summer 2023):

• Karen C. Burke (Florida), SALT Substitutes and Other Workarounds, 76 Tax Law. 605 (2023)
• Bruce A. McGovern (South Texas; Google Scholar) & Cassady V. (“Cass”) Brewer (Georgia State), Recent Developments in Federal Income Taxation: The Year 2022, 76 Tax Law. 645 (2023)

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Lesson From The Tax Court: Supervisory Approval Of Automated Penalties

Section 6751 requires the IRS to ensure adequate supervisory approval of tax penalties before those penalties are assessed.  But it does not require such approval for any “penalty automatically calculated through electronic means.” §6751(b)(2)(B).

Today we learn a surprisingly nuanced lesson about what constitutes a penalty automatically calculated through electronic means.  In Piper Trucking & Leasing v. Commissioner, 161 T.C. No. 3 (Sept. 14, 2023) (Judge Foley), the IRS assessed penalties against the taxpayer, under §6721, for Piper’s alleged failure to file required information returns.  The initial letter proposing such penalties was automatically generated, based on information received from the Social Security Administration.  But the proposed penalties were the most severe of several alternatives, alternatives that depended on the facts.  Yet no IRS employee was supposed to review the penalty unless and until the taxpayer responded to the initial letter in time.  In this case, the taxpayer made no timely response.  For that reason, the Tax Court held that these penalties fell within the statutory exception and required no human decisionmaker.

This lesson is just another reason why taxpayers need to be sure to respond to all correspondence received from the IRS.  Details below the fold.

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TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• California Raises Cost Of Bar Exam, Fees For Out-Of-State Lawyers By Up To 900%
• Taylor Swift And Lionel Messi Fans Face Tax Scrutiny From Democrats’ American Rescue Plan
• Constitution Day, Texas A&M, And Ken

Sunday:

• NY Times Op-Ed: What Happens When The Boss Invites You To Bible Study?
• McCaulley: The Streets Sent Me to the Pulpit
• WSJ Op-Ed: ‘Sunday Morning’ — Lawyer Wallace Stevens’s Divine Stanzas
• Wheaton College Releases Report On Its History Of Racism
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

The Top Five New Tax Papers

There is 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 #4.

1. [353 Downloads]  Is Everybody Obliged to Pay Taxes Somewhere?, by Wolfgang Schön (Max Planck)
2. [328 Downloads]  Taxing the Metaverse, by Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo; Google Scholar)
3. [298 Downloads]  The UK VAT at 50: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, by Rita de la Feria (Leeds; Google Scholar)
4. [292 Downloads]  Response by Tax-Exempt Organization Scholars to Request for Information, by Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.; Google Scholar), Roger Colinvaux (Catholic), Brian Galle (Georgetown; Google Scholar), Philip Hackney (Pittsburgh; Google Scholar) & Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer (Notre Dame; Google Scholar)
5. [288 Downloads]  Global Tax Hubs, by Eduardo Baistrocchi (London School of Economics; Google Scholar)

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. Press Release, Eugene Volokh, Who Graduated From UCLA At Age 15, Is Retiring From UCLA At Age 56 To Join The Hoover Institution
2. Reuters, Idaho Law School And Two Former Deans Settle Discrimination Case With Former Tenured Professor For $750,000
3. U.S. News, 2024 College Rankings Released With Biggest Methodology Changes In History, Including First-Ever Measure Of Faculty Research
4. Wall Street Journal, Board Of Governors Eliminates 143 Faculty Positions At West Virginia University And Law School
5. Ed Whelan (National Review), Conservative Speaker Reports On 'My Surprisingly Pleasant Experience At Yale Law School'
6. Robert Kuehn (Washington University), David Santacroce (Michigan), Margaret Reuter (UMKC), June Tai (Iowa) & G.S. Hans (Cornell), 2022-23 Survey of Applied Legal Education
7. Law.com, After Sexual Misconduct Allegations Against Former Tenured Law Professor, George Mason Bans Intimate Relationships Between Faculty And Students
8. Press Release, William & Mary Dean Ben Spencer Named Of Counsel At McGuireWoods, Major In Army Reserve JAG Corps
9. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), July 2023 Florida Bar Exam Results: Florida International Is #1 For 9th Year In A Row
10. New York Times, JoAnne Epps, Temple's Acting President And Former Provost And Law School Dean, Dies After Collapsing On Stage

Tax:

1. Daniel Hemel (NYU), The Low And High Stakes Of Moore v. United States
2. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: When 'My CPA Did It' Is No Defense To Penalties
3. Thomas Lee (BYU), Lawrence Solum (Virginia Scholar), James Cleith Phillips (Chapman) & Jesse Egbert (Northern Arizona), Moore, Corpus Linguistics, And The Original Public Meaning Of The Sixteenth Amendment
4. University of Miami Law School News, Death Of Elliot Manning
5. Bloomberg, Hedge Fund Billionaire Ken Griffin Subpoenas ProPublica Over Unlawful Disclosure Of His Tax Returns
6. Steven Dean (Boston University), Presentation Of Global Jim Crow: Taxation And Racial Capitalism At Boston University
7. Roundup, Next Week's Tax Workshops
8. David Elkins (Netanya), Review Of Valuation: Measuring Wealth Under A Wealth Tax, By Robin Morgan (Harvard)
9. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
10. Roundup, Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

Faith: 

1. Paul Woodruff (University of Texas), Final Thoughts As My Death Is Close At Hand
2. preLaw, The Most Devout Law Schools
3. John Inazu (Washington University), The Bad News About Politics Without Religion
4. Wall Street Journal, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings, And The Bible 
5. Alan Dershowitz (Harvard), Should Nonreligious Jewish Law Faculty Teach On Rosh Hashanah?

WSJ: Taylor Swift And Lionel Messi Fans Face Tax Scrutiny From Democrats’ American Rescue Plan

Wall Street Journal, The IRS Is Going to Know if You Sold Taylor Swift ‘Eras’ Tickets:

If you cashed in this summer by reselling tickets to Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” or Lionel Messi’s first games in a bubblegum-pink jersey, brace yourself to pay taxes.

A new law requires ticketing platforms like Ticketmaster and StubHub to give the Internal Revenue Service information on users who sold more than $600 worth of tickets this year.

The new requirements are taking hold amid a banner year for live events in which Swifties, soccer buffs and members of Beyoncé’s BeyHive paid sky-high prices for a chance to see their favorite stars in the flesh. That drove huge markups in the secondary ticket market—and delivered hefty profits to anyone hawking hot tickets.

The average price for Taylor Swift tickets sold in the U.S. on StubHub was $1,095, with the best seats going for thousands of dollars, according to the company, which operates an online market for people to resell and buy tickets. Averages for Beyoncé and Harry Styles clocked in at $380 and $400, respectively. After Lionel Messi joined Major League Soccer, the price of tickets to Inter Miami CF matches shot up to $255 apiece, from $30.

There was an unusually high number of fan ticket resellers this year, StubHub said. Fan sellers, as opposed to professional ticket brokers, have accounted for about 70% of U.S. “Eras Tour” ticket orders—double the proportion of what the company normally sees.

Some savvy or lucky fans resold their tickets to make a profit. Others reluctantly parted ways with tickets because their circumstances changed. ...

In the past, ticket-selling platforms were required to send 1099-K forms if a user received more than $20,000 in revenue and had more than 200 transactions. The new law, part of Democrats’ American Rescue Plan Act coronavirus relief package in early 2021, lowers the threshold to $600, irrespective of the number of transactions. The IRS reporting requirement is triggered by the sale price, not the seller’s profit. ...

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Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Elkins Reviews Morgan's Measuring Wealth Under A Wealth Tax

This week, David Elkins (Netanya; Google Scholar) reviews Robin Morgan (S.J.D. 2022, Harvard), Valuation: Measuring Wealth Under a Wealth Tax (2023).

Valuation is the Achilles heel of any tax system that relies upon…well, valuation. Income tax does its level best to avoid valuation, often simply by adopting a head-in-the-sand attitude and ignoring anything that is difficult to value. Unrealized appreciation is perhaps the notable example but others abound: disputed income, doubtful debt provisions, and certain types of fringe benefits to name a few. On other occasions, ignorance-is-bliss is not a sustainable policy and there is no option other than to attempt the frustrating task of valuation. The theory of practice of transfer pricing is a testimony to the suspicion that the attempt is more often than not an exercise in futility. Property taxes and estate taxes are similarly plagued with problems of valuation. Consider, for instance, the dispute surrounding Michael Jackson’s estate, which the executors valued at about $7 million and the IRS valued at $1.125 billion.

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Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

• American Enterprise Institute, The Supreme Court in Moore Should Not Enshrine the Realization Tax Principle in the Constitution
• Bloomberg, Bipartisan Tax Package Hopes Dim Amid Shutdown, Impeachment Talk
• Bloomberg, IRS Seeks to Hire 3,700 Agents to Pursue Wealthy Tax Dodgers
• Bloomberg, SALT Republicans Search for Unity While Blocking GOP Tax Bill

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Next Week’s Tax Workshops

Tuesday, September 26: Rebecca Kysar (Fordham; Google Scholar) will present The Global Tax Deal and the New International Economic Order as part of the NYU Tax Policy and Public Finance Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Daniel Shaviro. 

Thursday, September 28:  John Brooks (Fordham; Google Scholar) will present The Sixteenth Amendment and the Meaning of "Income" (with David Gamage (Indiana-Maurer; Google Scholar)) as part of the Columbia Davis Polk & Wardwell Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Michael Love.

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Avi-Yonah Presents Taxing Nomads: Reviving Citizenship-Based Taxation For The 21st Century Today At Boston College

Reuven Avi Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar) presents Taxing Nomads: Reviving Citizenship-Based Taxation for the 21st Century at Boston College today as part of its Tax Policy Collaborative hosted by James Repetti and Diane Ring.

The COVID pandemic and the rise of zooming has increased the ability of many people (primarily the rich) to work remotely. This in turn has led to more people moving to other countries to benefit from the ability to work remotely while enjoying other benefits such as lower housing prices, a more leisurely lifestyle, and in some cases greater political stability. Many Americans have used their newfound freedom to move overseas, e.g., to Italy. They and others like them are the new nomads.

Such a move is not tax motivated because Italy has higher personal tax rates than the US. It does, however, raise interesting tax issues because the US (uniquely) imposes worldwide taxation on its citizens wherever they live, while Italy (like most countries) does not tax non-resident citizens but taxes its residents on worldwide income regardless of their citizenship status.

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European Law Institute Hosts A Webinar Today On Taxation And Digital Assets

The ELI Business and Financial Law SIG hosts a webinar on Taxation and Digital Assets today at 9:00 A.M. EST (registration) (agenda):

We would like to invite you to the webinar on Taxation and Digital Assets on 22 September at 16:00 CEST. The webinar will address the taxation of digital assets including crypto, the metaverse, and NFTs. Topics covered will include the tax treatment of acquiring, holding and selling such assets. Panelists will include experts from the IMF, the US and Europe.

• Reuven S. Avi-Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar) & Yuri Biondi (CNRS) (moderator)
• Michael Keen (IMF), What are Digital Assets?
• Christine Kim (Cardozo; Google Scholar), Enforcement Issues and Taxing the Metaverse
• Amanda Parsons (Colorado; Google Scholar), US Taxation of Cryptocurrencies: Acquiring Crypto

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Osofsky Presents Legitimacy And Tax Enforcement Today At Florida

Leigh Osofsky (North Carolina; Google Scholar) presents Legitimacy and Tax Enforcement, 61 Harv. J. on Leg. __ (2024) (with Joshua D. Blank (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar)) at Florida today as part of its Tax Colloquium hosted by Yariv Brauner:

One of the most powerful charges that can be leveled against the IRS is that it is targeting taxpayers. Charges of political targeting have dogged the IRS for over a century, including in major controversies such as the so-called Tea Party auditing scandal in 2013. Commentators and scholars have long-critiqued the IRS for focusing audit resources on some of the lowest-income Americans. And, most recently, a group of researchers estimated that the IRS audits Black taxpayers at a 2.9 to 4.7 times greater rate, as compared to non-Black taxpayers. In response, legislators demanded action, there was widespread public consternation, and IRS officials stated that they were “deeply concerned by these findings.” These, and other, controversies suggest deep disdain for the targeting of taxpayers by the IRS.

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Goldin Presents Measuring And Mitigating Racial Disparities In Tax Audits Today At Columbia

Jacob Goldin (Chicago; Google Scholar) presents Measuring and Mitigating Racial Disparities in Tax Audits (with Hadi Elzayn (Stanford; Google Scholar), Evelyn Smith (Michigan), Thomas Hertz (U.S. Treasury), Arun Ramesh (Chicago), Robin Fisher (U.S. Treasury) & Daniel E. Ho (Stanford)) at Columbia today as part of its Davis Polk & Wardwell Tax Policy Colloquium hosted by Michael Love:

Government agencies around the world use data-driven algorithms to allocate enforcement resources. Even when such algorithms are formally neutral with respect to protected characteristics like race, there is widespread concern that they can disproportionately burden vulnerable groups. We study differences in Internal Revenue Service (IRS) audit rates between Black and non-Black taxpayers. Because neither we nor the IRS observe taxpayer race, we propose and employ a novel partial identification strategy to estimate these differences. Despite race-blind audit selection, we find that Black taxpayers are audited at 2.9 to 4.7 times the rate of non-Black taxpayers. The main source of the disparity is differing audit rates by race among taxpayers claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). Using counterfactual audit selection models for EITC claimants, we find that maximizing the detection of underreported taxes would not lead to Black taxpayers being audited at higher rates.

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Barry & Fleischer: Tax And The Boundaries Of The Firm

Jordan M. Barry (USC; Google Scholar) & Victor Fleischer (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar), Tax and the Boundaries of the Firm:

One of the most fundamental questions of economics is how firms decide what to produce themselves (“make”) and what to purchase from other firms (“buy”). We analyze how income taxes distort firms’ decisions along this and related dimensions. Three main effects emerge.

First, intrafirm transactions allow firms to reduce their tax burdens, such as by shifting their income to lower-tax jurisdictions. This effect is inherent to an income tax. It makes firms bigger, encouraging them to “make” more and “buy” less. Second, implementing an income tax entails enacting many additional rules, none of which is inherent to an income tax. Many of these rules affect the boundary of the firm. Some expand it; others contract it. However, these expansions and contractions generally operate along different dimensions, and thus do not offset each other. Finally, income taxes encourage regulatory arbitrage transactions, which enable firms to achieve their desired tax treatment without changing the economic boundary of the firm. These transactions preserve the boundary of the firm, but also create complexity, opacity, and inefficiency.

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NY Times: IRS To Reduce Audits Of Refundable Credits Like EITC To Ameliorate Racial Disparities

New York Times, I.R.S. Changes Audit Practice That Discriminated Against Black Taxpayers:

The Internal Revenue Service is overhauling how it scrutinizes the tax returns of lower-income Americans as part of an effort to reduce enforcement disparities that have made Black taxpayers far more likely than anyone else to be audited.

At the center of this effort is a major change to how the I.R.S. conducts audits of recipients of the earned-income tax credit, a special tax refund that was created to help low-income workers.

Tax returns that claim the E.I.T.C. have historically been more likely to be selected for audits, even if those investigations tend to yield little in taxes that are owed. Research has shown that audit rates for Black Americans are three to five times higher than for other taxpayers, with audits focused on the tax credit being a major driver of the disparity.

The I.R.S. has pledged to use the $80 billion that it received through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 to target wealthy taxpayers and make the tax system more equitable by ensuring that taxpayers are not disproportionately scrutinized because of their race.

“We are making broad efforts to overhaul compliance efforts in a manner that robustly advances our commitment to fair, equitable, and effective tax administration,” Daniel Werfel, the I.R.S. commissioner, wrote in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, on Monday.

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Death Of Elliot Manning (Miami)

University of Miami Law School News, In Memoriam: The Many Faces of Professor Elliot Manning

Professor of Law Emeritus and Dean's Distinguished Scholar for the Profession Emeritus Elliott Manning died Sunday, September 10 at 88.

"All of us who had the privilege of being Professor Manning’s colleagues have a profound sense of loss and a deep sense of gratitude for his many contributions to tax teaching and tax scholarship at Miami Law," said Frances Hill, Dean's Distinguished Scholar for the Profession. “He built the Graduate Tax Program into a position of national prominence.  He worked with students who found in his classes their life’s work as leading tax lawyers. ...

Having never been farther north than Virginia Beach, the Atlanta-born Manning left his home and his family in 1951 to start his freshman year at Columbia College in New York City. Manning later completed his juris doctor at Harvard Law School in 1958 and became an expert in tax law.

Before joining the University of Miami School of Law faculty in 1980, Manning was a senior partner in the New York firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton LLP and had yet to consider an academic career. "But I took a sabbatical and taught for a semester at Stanford University," he said in a 2014 interview. "I found I liked teaching, and when the University of Miami needed someone to run the Graduate Program in Taxation, my wife and I came here." ...

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Avi-Yonah: International Taxation, Globalization, And The Economic Digital Divide

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar), International Taxation, Globalization, and the Economic Digital Divide, 26 J. Int'l Econ. L. 101 (2023): 

The past decade has witnessed the creation of a new international tax regime (ITR). The original ITR was created a century ago by the League of Nations. Until the 1980s, it functioned reasonably well, and prevented most instances of double taxation and double non-taxation by allocating cross-border income between home and host jurisdictions based on a compromise reached in 1923.

However, since the advent of globalization in the 1980s and digitalization in the 1990s, the original ITR ceased to function as intended. The main problems were the increased mobility of capital related to increased intangibility and digitalization, together with a relaxation of capital controls and increased tax competition.

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Hemel: The Low And High Stakes Of Moore v. United States

Daniel J. Hemel (NYU; Google Scholar), The Low and High Stakes of Moore v. United States, 180 Tax Notes Fed. 563 (July 24, 2023):

Moore v. United States, the challenge to the constitutionality of the mandatory repatriation tax slated for argument at the Supreme Court in the October 2023 Term, looks at first glance like a battle between two different definitions of income. On one side, petitioners Charles and Kathleen Moore — cheered on by the Chamber of Commerce and the Wall Street Journal editorial board — argue that, for 16th Amendment purposes, “income” requires a realization event such as the receipt of money or an exchange of property. That theory, if it prevails, would cast doubt on numerous code provisions ranging from the original issue discount rules to the mark-to-market regime for regulated futures contracts.

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U.S. International Tax Policy And Corporate America

Christopher H. Hanna (SMU) & Cody A. Wilson (Gibson Dunn, Dallas), U.S. International Tax Policy and Corporate America, 48 J. Corp. L. 261 (2023): 

Given the Republican-controlled House and narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, the Biden Administration has found itself in the perilous situation of needing to raise tax revenue while retaining the support of moderate Democrats. President Biden has proposed raising revenue by bringing the United States closer to a worldwide no deferral system and raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent. These changes are unlikely to become law. Together, they simply do not have the support of moderate Democrats, Republicans, and, especially, Corporate America.

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Nam: Just Taxation Of Crime — Should The Commission Of Crime Change One’s Tax Liability?

Jeesoo Nam (USC; Google Scholar), Just Taxation of Crime: Should the Commission of Crime Change One’s Tax Liability?, 54 Ariz. St. L.J. 1213 (2022): 

The tax law treats criminals differently from non-criminals. Should it? Under the public policy doctrine, for example, various tax deductions are disallowed if they are closely tied to criminal activity. Criminal activity is, in multiple ways, tax disadvantaged compared to non-criminal activity.

This Article considers a variety of possible justifications. (1) The tax disadvantage provides an incentive not to commit crime. (2) The tax disadvantage helps to bring deserved punishment to the criminal. (3) Criminals have given up their right not to be taxed. (4) Criminals have taken an unfair advantage and so must be stripped of that unfair advantage. (5) Criminals deserve to bear the costs that they culpably and wrongfully created.

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Hedge Fund Billionaire Ken Griffin Subpoenas ProPublica Over Unlawful Disclosure Of His Tax Returns

Bloomberg, Ken Griffin Subpoenas ProPublica Over Secret Tax Returns Leak:

Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin has subpoenaed ProPublica and five of its journalists for documents related to the publication of reports that detailed his secret tax return information.

The Citadel founder requested the information last month as part of his lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, according to a filing Tuesday in federal court in Miami. Griffin claims in the suit that the IRS failed to establish “appropriate administrative, technical, and/or physical safeguards” to protect his private data.

ProPublica published tax information last year about many of the wealthiest US taxpayers, including Griffin. It reported he had an average annual income of almost $1.7 billion between 2013 and 2018 and paid an average federal tax rate of 29.2% during that time. Billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk had in some years paid minimal or no income tax even as their fortunes soared, ProPublica reported.

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National Tax Journal Hosts Forum Today On Gender And Public Policy

The National Tax Association hosts a National Tax Journal forum on Gender and Public Policy today at 12:30 PM ET (registration):

The Editors of the National Tax Journal (NTJ) are excited to continue our webinar series that periodically features some of the NTJ’s recently published articles.

Our next webinar will comprise four papers from the Forum of the September 2023 issue. Despite decades of progress, the path to gender equality in the U.S. remains long. The gender wage gap persists across the entire workforce, and women spend more time on average on unpaid household work and caretaking. There are also clear gender gaps in a wide array of economic, educational, and health outcomes. Recently, it has become increasingly recognized that public policies that are applied uniformly can mitigate or exacerbate these existing gender inequalities because of the different economic circumstances and family structures experienced by women and those in the LGBTQ+ community. The papers in this Forum explore several issues in gender and public policy.

Webinar Panelists:

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Newton Presents Closing The Opportunity Gap Today At UC-San Francisco

Deanna Newton (Pepperdine) presents Closing the Opportunity Gap at UC-San Francisco today as part of its Tax Speaker Series hosted by Heather Field:

Opportunity Zones are low-income areas or economically distressed communities in the United States. The Opportunity Zone program encourages investment in low-income areas or economically distressed communities by offering investors tax benefits. Scholars have found little evidence that Opportunity Zones positively impact zone residents’ lives, concluding that Opportunity Zone legislation mostly benefits wealthy investors and should be reformed to benefit community members better. Investors are currently not required to finance projects geared toward the needs of local communities; they are instead funding developments they would have already invested in, whether located in an Opportunity Zone or not. This Article argues that current reform efforts and related scholarship do not give adequate weight to active and direct participation by community members and investors as it relates to economic development tax incentives. It argues for a comprehensive framework that focuses on active, direct, and transformative participation by community members and investors.

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Dean Presents Global Jim Crow: Taxation And Racial Capitalism At Boston University

Steven Dean (Boston University) presents his forthcoming book Global Jim Crow: Taxation And Racial Capitalism (Oxford University Press) at Boston University today as part of its Congresswoman Barbara Jordan Speaker Series on Race, Law, and Inequality (register here):

What makes some nations rich and others poor? Why do even the most powerful states struggle to tax giant multinationals? One answer to both questions lies in a system of Global Jim Crow created as a response to fears over the rise of sovereign African states in the late 1950s and 1960s. For more than half a century, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has shielded multinationals from taxation, doing its job so well that even the wealthiest states lack urgently needed tax revenues. More than six decades into its existence, the OECD has still never had a majority-Black member and continues to exploit anti-Black racism to preserve its power.

Congresswoman Barbara Jordon Speaker Series on Race, Law & Inequality
Despite the laudable ideals expressed by this nation’s founders, US law has routinely been written, enacted, and interpreted by those in power in ways that reinforce, rather than dismantle, racial inequality. In this sense, law has become one part of the structures in which racism is embedded. This structural racism touches upon every area of the law, and nearly 250 years into this democratic experiment that is the United States, people of color have still not gained full and equal membership in US society. 

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Lesson From The Tax Court: When 'My CPA Did It' Is No Defense To Penalties

Life is complex.  Tax shadows life.  So it is no wonder that Tax law is complex.  And the more complex a taxpayer’s financial life becomes, the more likely they will goof up.  While Congress imposes penalties for errors, it also recognizes the complexity of tax law by allowing taxpayers to avoid most penalties if they can show they had reasonable cause for their errors.  A common defense against penalties is that the taxpayer reasonably relied on the advice of a competent professional.

Sometimes, however, taxpayers think that relying on a professional to prepare the return absolves them of responsibility for any subsequent errors.  Today’s lesson puts the lie to that thought.  Relying on a CPA’s return preparation services is not the same as relying on a CPA’s advice and provides no protection from the various penalties in §6662.

In John R. Johnson, et al. v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2023-116 (Sept. 13, 2023) (Judge Nega), the taxpayer was hit with §6662(b) penalties for substantially understating his income tax liabilities for four years in a row.  That’s a lot of error.  He argued that he had reasonable cause for the errors because he had used a CPA to prepare his returns and he had provided that CPA all the relevant information.  He even put his CPA on the stand.

The failure of that argument provides the lesson.  We learn that to avoid penalties taxpayer must do more than show they relied on a CPA to properly prepare the return, especially when the taxpayer is sophisticated.  Details below the fold. 

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Kysar Presents The Global Tax Deal And Its Implications Today At Loyola-L.A.

Rebecca Kysar (Fordham; Google Scholar) presents The Global Tax Deal and Its Implications at Loyola-L.A. today as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium hosted by Katie Pratt and Ted Seto:

The ethos of economic integration and trade liberation no longer reigns supreme. Instead of multilateral trade agreements, nations are turning towards protectionism and unilateralism. Yet in late 2021, nearly 140 countries agreed to a new international tax system that is aimed at levelling the playing field among them, curtailing competition on corporate tax rates and corporate profit shifting to tax havens through a new global minimum tax as well as constructing a new allocation of taxing rights among nations.

Although multilateral trade agreements now seem out of reach, tax multilateralism is ascendant. This is surprising given the deep connection between taxation and national sovereignty. It also perplexing since international tax does not exhibit the same theoretical harmony between national and worldwide welfare that international trade enjoys. The traditional account offered by economists is that trade liberalization is a rising tide that will lift all boats because countries will produce according to their competitive advantages and trade the rest, making trade suitable for international coordination. In contrast, tax is largely described as a zero-sum contest for a fixed pot of tax revenues, deeming it ill-suited for collective action.

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TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• After Sexual Misconduct Allegations Against Former Tenured Professor, George Mason Law School Bans Intimate Relationships Between Faculty And Students
• Fellowship Opportunities For The 116th National Tax Association Conference
• Board Of Governors Eliminates 143 Faculty Positions At West Virginia University And Law School

Sunday:

• Inazu: The Bad News About Politics Without Religion
• University Of Texas Professor: Final Thoughts As My Death Is Close At Hand
• Do Devout Law Schools Take A Hit In The U.S. News Peer Reputation Rankings?
• 'Surprised By Oxford' Film Highlights How C.S. Lewis, Romantic Poets Helped Bring A Skeptic To Faith
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

The Top Five New Tax Papers

There is 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 #3.

1. [728 Downloads]  Moore v. United States and the Original Meaning of Income, by John Brooks (Fordham; Google Scholar) & David Gamage (Indiana-Maurer; Google Scholar) (reviewed by Michelle Layser (San Diego; Google Scholar) here)
2. [337 Downloads]  Is Everybody Obliged to Pay Taxes Somewhere?, by Wolfgang Schön (Max Planck)
3. [286 Downloads]  Taxing the Metaverse, by Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo; Google Scholar)
4. [282 Downloads]  The UK VAT at 50: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, by Rita de la Feria (Leeds; Google Scholar)
5. [255 Downloads]  Global Tax Hubs, by Eduardo Baistrocchi (London School of Economics; Google Scholar)

This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Oregon (Adjunct Faculty Diversity) And Kentucky (Financial Resources) Are Back In Compliance With Accreditation Standards
2. preLaw, The Most Diverse Law Schools
3. University Business, Are Professors Too Soft On Grading? Survey Says 8 In 10 Give In To ‘Grade Grubbing’
4. Quacquarelli Symonds, 2023 World Law School Rankings
5. Connecticut Law Tribune, After Nearly 2 Years Of Litigation, Law Students Drop Suit Against Yale
6. Harvard Law School Center On The Legal Profession, The Black-White Student Debt Gap Among Law School Graduates
7. Chloe Sovinee-Dyroff (Colorado), Introverted Lawyers: Agents Of Change In The Legal Profession 
8. Reuters, NextGen Bar Exam To Debut In July 2026: 25% Shorter Than Current Uniform Bar Exam Used By 41 States 
9. Steven Boutcher (Law & Society Association), Jason Houle (Dartmouth), Anna Raup-Kounovksy (Penn State) & Carroll Seron (UC-Irvine), A Faustian Bargain? Rethinking The Role Of Debt In Law Students' Career Choices 
10. The Logic, University Of Toronto Law School Returns Undisclosed $450,000 Gift From Amazon 

Tax:

1. Bloomberg Businessweek, How Stanford Professors Joe Bankman And Barbara Fried Enabled Their Son Sam's Crypto Empire
2. Thomas Brennan (Harvard) & David Schizer (Columbia), Transaction-Specific Tax Reform In Three Steps: The Case Of Constructive Ownership
3. Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.), Roger Colinvaux (Catholic), Brian Galle (Georgetown), Philip Hackney (Pittsburgh) & Lloyd Mayer (Notre Dame), Response by Tax-Exempt Organization Scholars to Request for Information
4. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: The Boundary Waters Of Equity
5. Kathleen DeLaney Thomas (North Carolina), Rethinking Tax Information: The Case For Quarterly 1099s 
6. Law Schools Seeking to Hire Tax Profs:  Michigan State, Rutgers
7. Roundup, Next Week’s Tax Workshops
8. Sloan Speck (Colorado), Review Of Phaseouts, By Daniel Hemel (NYU)
9. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
10. Roundup, Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

Faith: 

1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Shane Claiborne At Pepperdine Caruso Law: 'We Belong And Pursue Truth As One'
2. preLaw, The Most Devout Law Schools
3. Alan Dershowitz (Harvard), Should Nonreligious Jewish Law Faculty Teach On Rosh Hashanah? 
4. Wall Street Journal, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord Of The Rings, And The Bible 
5. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Sherif Girgis (Notre Dame) Presents Fragility Not Superiority? Assessing The Fairness Of Special Religious Protections At Pepperdine

Fellowship Opportunities For The 116th National Tax Association Conference

The National Tax Association offers three fellowship opportunities for the 116th Annual Conference:

There are three fellowship/funding opportunities for the 116th Annual Conference, the NTA DEI Travel Fellowship, the the NTA Tax Climate Fellowship and the the NTA/CSWEP Mentoring Dinner for Women/Non-Binary Persons.  Read on for specifics for each fellowship. The deadline for all opportunities below is September 22nd. Recipients will be notified no later than October 6th. Questions? Email us: [email protected].

NTA Equity and Inclusion Travel Fellowship

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Weekly SSRN Tax Article Review And Roundup: Speck Reviews Hemel's Phaseouts

This week, Sloan Speck (Colorado; Google Scholar) reviews a new work by Daniel J. Hemel (NYU; Google Scholar), Phaseouts, 74 Tax L. Rev. __ (2024):

Since the transition from class tax to mass tax in the Second World War, the U.S. income tax system has applied income-based limitations to tax expenditures. In Phaseouts, Daniel Hemel explores why rational policymakers might prefer these benefits-specific limitations (which can be drafted as phaseouts or phase-ins, or as ceilings or floors) to “the more straightforward alternative” of an unrestricted benefit coupled with revenue-neutral rate adjustments across income levels (2). Phaseouts, of course, are legion in today’s Internal Revenue Code, and Hemel does his usual brilliant work in elucidating the contours and stakes of these pervasive provisions, even when deployed by a Congress less disinterested—and perhaps less rational—than one might prefer.

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Tax Policy In The Biden Administration

• American Prospect, The Stealth Attack on the Power to Tax
• Bloomberg, IRS Agrees to Settlement in Easement Penalty Backdating Case
• Bloomberg, Norway Wealth Tax Pushes the Rich to Move to Switzerland 
• Common Dreams, With Funds Opposed by GOP, IRS to Target Ultrawealthy Tax Delinquents
• Inequality.org, Economists, Millionaires, and Elected Officials to G20: Tax Extreme Wealth

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Next Week’s Tax Workshops

Monday, September 18: Deanna  Newton (Pepperdine) will present Opportunity Gap as part of the UC-San Francisco Tax Speaker Series. If you would like to attend, please contact Heather Field.

Monday, September 18: Rebecca Kysar (Fordham; Google Scholar) will present The Global Tax Deal and Its Implications as part of the Loyola-L.A. Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please RSVP here. 

Monday, September 18: Steven Dean (Boston University) will present Global Jim Crow: Taxation and Racial Capitalism (Oxford University Press 2023) as part of the Boston University Congresswoman Barbara Jordan Speaker Series On Race, Law, & Inequality. If you would like to attend, please RSVP here. 

Thursday, September 21: Jacob Goldin (Chicago; Google Scholar) will present Measuring and Mitigating Racial Disparities in Tax Audits  (with Hadi Elzayn (Stanford; Google Scholar), Evelyn Smith (Michigan), Thomas Hertz (U.S. Treasury), Arun Ramesh (Chicago), Robin Fisher (U.S. Treasury) & Daniel Ho (Stanford)) as part of the Columbia Davis Polk & Wardwell Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Michael Love.

Friday, September 22: Reuven Avi Yonah (Michigan; Google Scholar) will present Taxing Nomads: Reviving Citizenship-Based Taxation for the 21st Century as part of the Boston College Tax Policy Collaborative. If you would like to attend, please contact Jim Repetti or Diane Ring. 

Friday, September 22: Leigh Osofsky (North Carolina; Google Scholar) will present Legitimacy and Tax Enforcement, 61 Harv. J. on Leg. __ (2024) (with Joshua D. Blank (UC-Irvine; Google Scholar)) as part of the Florida Tax Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Yariv Brauner. 

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Federal Tax Procedure (2023 Practitioner Ed)

John A. Townsend (Houston; Google Scholar), Federal Tax Procedure (2023 Practitioner Ed.) (1,603 pages):

Federal Tax Procedure is a book originally prepared for a course on Tax Procedure taught by Adjunct Professor Townsend at the University of Houston School of Law (through the Fall of 2015). The book is updated annually in August. The book and related materials contain text discussion, relevant Code Section citations, and certain cases designed to encourage students to think about the Tax Procedure process. The book is in electronic format (Adobe Acrobat PDF format) and is in two versions – (1) a Student Edition (no footnotes but with key statutes and cases in the text); and (2) a Practitioner Edition (same as Student Edition but including extensive footnotes). This is the 2023 Practitioner Edition. Both versions are available on Mr. Townsend's SSRN web page. 

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Kim Presents Taxing The Metaverse Today At Columbia

Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo; Google Scholar) presents Taxing the Metaverse, 112 Geo. L.J. __ (2024) at Columbia today as part of its Davis Polk & Wardwell Tax Policy Colloquium hosted by Michael Love:

The buzz surrounding the Metaverse has been growing steadily for the past couple of years, but the tax implications of this novel ecosystem remain fuzzy to most tax scholars. Such uncertainty is concerning, given the potential and momentum of this emerging technology. Although the Metaverse evolved from online video games focused only on user consumption, it now allows users to produce income and accumulate wealth entirely within the Metaverse. Current law seems to defer taxation of such until a realization or cash-out event. This paper challenges this approach.

This paper offers novel arguments justifying Metaverse taxation. Because economic activity within the Metaverse satisfies the Haig-Simons and Glenshaw Glass definitions of income, its exclusion will create a tax haven. Tax policy can also play an essential role in regulating the virtual economy. Furthermore, this emerging technology allows policymakers to modernize the tax system. 

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Thomas: Rethinking Tax Information—The Case For Quarterly 1099s

Kathleen DeLaney Thomas (North Carolina; Google Scholar), Rethinking Tax Information: The Case for Quarterly 1099s, 97 S. Cal. L. Rev. __ (2024):

When an electricity provider wants customers to pay their bills monthly, it sends them a bill each month. Yet this is not how the tax system works, at least for independent contractors. Their taxes are due quarterly, but they receive a tax statement (Form 1099) only one time a year. It is up to the individual, then, to know when their taxes are due and how to pay them, and it is on that individual to estimate how much they owe each quarter. As a result, compliance for independent contractors – particularly for online platform workers–tends to be lacking. Failure to pay their estimated taxes subjects these taxpayers to potential penalties and causes the government to collect less tax revenue.

There is a simple, yet entirely overlooked, reform that could vastly improve compliance when it comes to paying estimated taxes: third-party information returns (Form 1099s) should be issued to taxpayers on a quarterly basis. The idea is straightforward and intuitive.

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How Stanford Professors Joe Bankman And Barbara Fried Enabled Their Son Sam's Crypto Empire

Bloomberg Businessweek, How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Elite Parents Enabled His Crypto Empire:

Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, both renowned Stanford scholars, opened doors for their son and provided a halo effect for his company.

Around the Bankman and Fried house, Larry David was a family favorite. So the parents were understandably excited when they got the email from their son Sam. He wrote that his company, FTX, would be airing a commercial during the 2022 Super Bowl and that David was starring in it.

The curmudgeonly comedian would play a series of skeptics throughout history, basically Neolithic and Elizabethan versions of his character from HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Someone would present an invention—the wheel, the lightbulb, the Walkman and, finally, FTX—and David would dismiss each one in quick succession. The ad would warn viewers that if they didn’t invest in crypto, they were missing out on an historic opportunity to get rich. The tag line: “Don’t be like Larry.”

Sam Bankman-Fried’s parents loved it. “Surreal,” wrote Barbara Fried. His dad, Joseph Bankman, gushed over how happy and proud he was. A few days later, employees received some additional feedback from Sam’s younger brother, Gabe. He asked if his dad could have a role in the commercial, saying he was too humble to make the request himself.

The request was odd in a sense. Bankman had no formal role at FTX at the time. Nor did Gabe, who was running an FTX-backed nonprofit dedicated to preventing pandemics. But executives at FTX understood that corporate roles, especially as they related to the co-founder and chief executive officer, were much blurrier.

Not long afterward, Bankman showed up on set for a scene in which David vehemently opposed the Declaration of Independence. When told “the people shall have the right to vote,” David responded incredulously: “Even the stupid ones?” Bankman, wearing a powdered wig, shouted, “Yes!” FTX paid roughly $20 million to create and air the 60-second spot. Around the same time, Bankman joined the company as an employee.

A person familiar with the commercial’s production—who, like most people interviewed for this story, requested anonymity to avoid being associated with a messy bankruptcy, numerous class-action lawsuits and several criminal cases—says the decision to give the boss’s dad a role made a certain sense within the upside-down logic of FTX. In a way, Bankman was the company’s founding father.

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Moore, Corpus Linguistics, And The Original Public Meaning Of The Sixteenth Amendment

Thomas R. Lee (BYU), Lawrence B. Solum (Virginia; Google Scholar), James Cleith Phillips (Chapman) & Jesse Egbert (Northern Arizona; Google Scholar), Corpus Linguistics and the Original Public Meaning of the Sixteenth Amendment:

Moore v. United States raises the question whether unrealized gains, such as an increase in property value or a stock portfolio, constitute “incomes, from whatever source derived” under the original meaning of Sixteenth Amendment. This is widely viewed as the most important tax case to reach the United States Supreme Court in decades. It is also an opportunity for the Court to refine its theory and method of finding original meaning.

We focus here on the original public meaning of the Sixteenth Amendment—the ordinary, common meaning attributed to its text by the general public in 1913. So far, the parties and amici have relied on contemporaneous dictionaries to argue over such meaning. But the cited dictionaries don’t establish the ordinary meaning of “incomes, from whatever source derived”; they highlight a key ambiguity in the very terms of the definitions presented.

This article fills important gaps in the original public meaning analysis in Moore. It introduces principles of linguistic theory that align with—and help refine—strands of the Court’s originalist inquiry. And as to method, it introduces evidence from corpus linguistic analysis to provide a transparent, replicable basis for assessing the ordinary public meaning of the Sixteenth Amendment’s relevant terms.

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