[posted by Allison Christians]  Last installment on the University of Chicago’s 58th Annual Tax Conference…

After a spirited discussion of acquisitive D reorgs, yesterday’s last panel considered ongoing issues in the area of deferred compensation, with Dana Trier (former Tax Legislative Counsel and Acting Deputy
Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy in the Treasury Department, now partner at Davis, Polk & Wardwell) raising tax policy issues regarding deferred compensation plans, stock options, restricted stock and carried interests in partnerships. This morning’s panel shifted the focus to tax exempt organizations and issues in partnership taxation.  In the first panel, Patrick C. Gallagher (partner, Kirkland & Ellis) briefly described the historical development and policy of the unrelated business taxable income (UBTI) rules and discussed the new SILO rules.   Discussion centered on how well the rules prevent gaming and how they should do so. 

The second panel tackled the thorny problems of allocating debt in partnership structures.  Eric Sloan (Managing Principal of the Joint Venture and Passthrough Services Group in the National Tax Office of Deloitte Tax LLP, and adjunct professor of tax at Georgetown) explored the development of the regulations under section 752 and used various examples to explore economic risk of loss–what it is, how it is defined in the regulations ("liabilities allocated in accordance with loss sharing ratios, and assuming worst case scenario") versus other approaches, and how these other approaches would play out in various scenarios.  That’s a lot of thinking for a Saturday morning. 

Papers from the conference are available here, and all papers and prepared comments will be published in the March 2006 issue of Taxes (CCH).