David Weisbach (Chicago) presents The Regulation of Tax Advisors at Loyola-L.A. today as part of its Tax Policy Colloquium Series (with Brian Galle (Boston College)). The commentators are Michael Guttentag (Loyola-LA) & Nathan Hochman (Bingham, Los Angeles) &  Here is the abstract:

We examine the effects of advice about the content of the tax law. Advice informs individuals about the content of the law, so individuals in the absence of advice must be uncertain about that content. We can model the effects of advice by examining whether deadweight loss goes up or down when taxpayers are informed about the content of the law. Although this abstracts away from many aspects of tax advice and in particular does not consider principal/agent aspects of the advisor/client relationship, it captures important elements of many recent regulations concerning tax advice. In this simple setting and if taxpayers have unbiased priors about the content of the law, we show that for linear taxes, advice reduces deadweight loss. For nonlinear taxes, whether advice increases or reduces deadweight loss depends on the relationship between marginal and average rates. We consider a number of extensions including whether the taxpayer has optimal incentives to seek advice and whether advice increases or reduces deadweight loss when the tax law is imperfect due to information constraints.