[posted by Allison Christians]  Continued coverage of the University of Chicago’s 58th Annual Tax Conference…

The second panel of the Chicago Tax Conference introduced a vigorous debate about the relative merits of repealing deferral (by taxing all foreign income currently, treating CFCs as branches, or treating them as domestic companies), in which Barbara Angus (former International Tax Counsel for the Office of Tax Policy, Department of the Treasury, now a principal of Angus & Nickerson, a consulting firm specializing in the
development and implementation of legislative and regulatory solutions
on a broad range of tax matters, and adjunct professor of taxation at Georgetown Law) and Peter Merrill (former Chief Economist of the Joint Committee on Taxation of the U.S. Congress, now Director of the National Economic Consulting Group in the Washington National Tax Services office of  PWC) lamented the possible effects of such a strategy on the competitiveness of US multinationals, prompting much discussion among the panelists and participants, including Julie Roin (Univ. of Chicago) and Stephen Shay (Ropes & Gray) who expressed some skepticism of the comptetitiveness point and offered alternative thoughts about protecting the tax base.  The panelists discussed a few such alternatives such as adopting formulary apportionment, (to eliminate transfer pricing problems) and scrapping the corporate tax in favor of progressive consumption taxes (to eliminate all problems). 

All interntional tax issues having thereby been resolved, the conference turned to domestic issues this afternoon.  In the third panel, Michael L. Schultz (former attorney-advisor in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Legislative Counsel, now partner at McKee Nelson) addressed "Reorganizations Among Commonly Controlled Corporations,"  focusing on the increasingly slippery area of acquisitive D reorgs, the continued existence of which is called into question by developments in the law since 1986.  Much discussion here on the role of continutity of interest and 302, whether the statute has a stock issuance requirement, whether there is authority to deem issuance of stock and if so, can that be done on a case-by-case basis.  Mike also called for the withdrawal of the March 2005 proposed regs that introduced a "net value" requirement for reorg treatment.