NYU and UCLA today announced the inauguration of the NYU-UCLA Tax Policy Conference, a joint annual conference that will focus on tax policy issues from both a legal and economic perspective:

The conference is intended to provide a forum in which leading scholars, policymakers and practitioners can offer expert perspectives on complex tax policy questions and options for reform. The first conference will be held this October in Los Angeles and will focus on the tax policy implications of health care reform. 

The joint undertaking brings together two of the nation’s strongest tax law faculties. Conference organizers include members of NYU’s highly regarded tax law faculty and UCLA Law’s business law and policy program. The annual conference will build on both NYU’s longstanding Tax Policy Colloquium, which has served as a forum for tax policy discussion among scholars, students and practitioners for 16 years, and the UCLA Colloquium on Tax Policy and Public Finance, which was started in 2004.

At the first conference, “Tax Policy and Health Care Reform,” in October 2011 in Los Angeles, participants will address questions of tax alternatives to fund health care reform, tax subsidies and penalties for health insurance, using the tax system to implement individual health insurance mandates, and the desirability of tax benefits for nonprofit health care providers in the post–health care reform world. 

The second conference will be held in October 2012 in New York and is tentatively titled “The Income Tax at 100,” to mark the 100th anniversary, in 2013, of the modern U.S. income tax.  Consistent with the founding themes of this joint conference, the 2012 NYU–UCLA conference will take stock of the American income tax at this historical juncture and consider prospects for tax reform at the dawn of the income tax’s second century.