Michelle Kwon (Texas Tech) presents The Tax Man’s Ethics: Four of the Hardest Ethical Questions for an IRS Lawyer, 10 Cardozo Pub. L. Pol’y & Ethics J. ___ (2011), at SMU today as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium Series. Here is the abstract:

The article explores the disagreement, particularly among academics, about whether government lawyers have greater obligations to the public than non-government lawyers (the public interest approach) or whether government lawyers should zealously advocate for their agency clients’ objectives in the same manner as non-government lawyers (the traditional approach). The article proposes that the traditional and public interest approaches to legal ethics are not necessarily mutually exclusive by describing the ethical responsibilities of lawyers of the IRS Office of Chief Counsel in the context of the following four hypothetical situations: (1) remaining silent in the face of an expired statute of limitations; (2) affirmatively raising a defense to defeat a taxpayer’s meritorious claim; (3) continuing to litigate a losing case; and (4) conceding a winning case.