The University of Minnesota Law School will host a conference on Friday, October 27 on The Future of Tax Shelters:

Tax shelter activity has been widespread for decades. IRS attempts to curtail that activity have met with mixed results. For a time, it seemed that the IRS might have succeeded as never before, as Congress held hearings, the Treasury Department substantially expanded tax shelter disclosure requirements, and the Department of Justice brought criminal prosecutions against several KPMG tax professionals. Recently, however, there has been pushback from the courts, the tax profession, and even Congress. Did the government overreach and target legitimate business activity? Was the KPMG-prompted decline merely a cyclical downturn, to be followed by a return to previous levels of tax shelter activity? What will the future hold for tax shelters?

This conference will bring together top tax scholars and professionals as well as scholars from other disciplines who are thinking about tax shelters from different perspectives to evaluate the present and future of tax shelters.

Keynote Speaker:  Pamela Olson (Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (Tax Policy))

Penel #1:  Moderator:  Morgan Holcomb (Minnesota)

• Paper:  State Tax Shelters and State Taxation of Capital, by Joseph Bankman (Stanford)
• Commentary:  Kirk Stark (UCLA)

Panel #2:  Moderator:  Claire A. Hill (Minnesota)

• Paper:  Tax Investment Strategies, Business Method Patents, and the Firm, by Dan L. Burk (Minnesota) & Brett H. McDonnell (Minnesota)
• Commentary:  Brant Hellwig (South Carolina)
• Paper:  Legal Evolution and Gaming the System, by Philip Curry (Simon Fraser University)
• Commentary:  David Weisbach (Chicago)
• Commentary:  The Consistency of Inconsistency, by Terrance Chorvat (George Mason)

Panel #3:  Moderator:  Bruce Snider (Minnesota)

• Paper:  Compaq Redux: Implicit Taxes and the Question of Pre-Tax Profit, by Michael Knoll (Penn)
• Commentary: Robert J. Peroni (Texas)
• Paper:  Of Lenity, Chevron, and KPMG, by Kristin E. Hickman (Minnesota)
• Commentary:  Tax Shelters: Intentionalism’s Greatest Challenge, by Lawrence M. Solan (Brooklyn)

Paper #4:  Moderator:  Kristin E. Hickman (Minnesota)

• Paper:  Options Backdating and Corporate Culture, by Victor Fleischer (Colorado)
• Commentary:  Tax Lawyers are People Too, by Claire A. Hill (Minnesota)
• Paper:  In Defense of Tax Shelters, by Leo Katz (Penn)
• Commentary:  In Defense of Back-Summersaults, by Daniel N. Shaviro (NYU)

To register for this wonderful, free conference, email here.