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TaxProf Blog

Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law

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  • Top 5 Tax Paper Downloads

    Ssrn_logo_85There is a bit of movement on this week’s list of the Top 5 Recent Tax Paper Downloads on SSRN, with the #4 and #5 papers changing places on the list:

    1.  [215 Downloads]  The Constitutionality of Federal Taxes and Federal Tax Provisions, by Joseph M. Dodge (Florida State)  [blogged here]

    2.  [176 Downloads]  Celebrating Life (Chai) and Taxes: Lessons Learned, Francine J. Lipman (Chapman)  [blogged here]

    3.  [146 Downloads]  Wheir’s the Beef?: Buffalo Law and Taxation, by Erik M. Jensen (Case Western)  [blogged here]

    4.  [112 Downloads]  Taxing Emotional Injury Recoveries: A Critical Analysis of Murphy v. Internal Revenue Service, by Gregory L. Germain (Syracuse)  [blogged here]

    5.  [110 Downloads]  Tax Expenditures as Foreign Aid, by David Pozen (Yale J.D. 2007)  [blogged here]

  • Paul Caron

    WSJ: Charities Love IRA Rollovers

    Interesting article in the Weekend Wall Street Journal:  Charities Love IRA Rollovers; Groups Push for Permanent Expansion of New Law, by Arden Dale:

    Seniors have until the end of the year to take advantage of a new way to make charitable gifts:

    • People 70½ or older can roll over up to $100,000 a year from their IRAs to charities, but the provision expires at the end of 2007
    • Charities report a slew of new donations from IRAs since the provision was signed into law in August
    • Some nonprofit groups are pushing to make the provision permanent and extend its reach
  • Paul Caron

    IRS Oversight Board Releases 2006 Annual Report

    Irs_oversight_board The IRS Oversight Board has released its 2006 Annual Report.  From the press release:

    The IRS made steady progress last year towards “transforming itself into a modern institution that provides efficient and effective tax administration services to America’s taxpayers,” according to the IRS Oversight Board’s 2006 Annual Report. However, “the IRS must still meet a number of challenges before it can achieve the vision of a 21st Century tax administration agency described in the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998.” …

    The Board found that the IRS is pressing forward to meet its strategic goals and credits the agency for delivering some noteworthy gains in the past year, such as an increase in enforcement activity and stable customer service levels. According to a survey commissioned by the Board in 2006, taxpayers also increasingly recognize that the IRS provides good quality service through a variety of channels, such as its web site, toll-free telephone lines and Taxpayer Assistance Centers. The Board commends the IRS for these hard-won gains.

    However, the Oversight Board’s foremost concern remains the tax gap – the difference between what taxpayers legally owe and what is actually collected. The IRS’ most recent estimate for the annual net tax gap is $290 billion, based on 2001 tax returns:

    Tax_gap_5

  • Paul Caron

    WSJ: Law School Should Be More Like Medical School

    StracherInteresting article in the Wall Street Journal:  Meet the Clients, by Cameron Stracher (New York Law School):

    The recent arrest of Anderson Kill & Olick paralegal Brian Valery for practicing law without a license raises a number of questions about how the ersatz Fordham graduate could have gotten away with representing corporate clients in complex litigation — without ever having gone to law school. The more salient question, however, is: Would it have mattered if he had? …

    There appears to be an emerging consensus that although law schools may teach students how to "think like a lawyer," they don’t really teach them how to be a lawyer.

    It is hard not to agree. One of the biggest problems with the current state of legal education is its emphasis on books rather than people. By reading about the law rather than engaging in it, students end up with the misperception that lawyers spend most of their time debating the niceties of the Rule Against Perpetuities rather than sorting out the messy, somewhat anarchic version of the truth that judges and courts care about. When they graduate, young lawyers rarely know how to interview clients, advocate for their positions, negotiate a settlement or perform any number of other tasks that lawyers do every day. In short, they are woefully unprepared to be lawyers, despite the outrageous hourly fees charged for their services.

    (more…)

  • Paul Caron

    Pozen on Tax Expenditures as Foreign Aid

    David Pozen (Yale J.D. 2007) has published Tax Expenditures as Foreign Aid, 116 Yale L.J. 869 (2007).  Here is the abstract:

    Whether the U.S. government should be allowed to claim credit for the private philanthropy of its citizens is a hot topic in today’s foreign aid debate. Overlooked in this debate, however, is a form of aid that straddles the traditional public/private divide: charitable tax expenditures. Through the many tax privileges that the United States grants to its nonprofit organizations, the government implicitly foots some portion of the bill anytime these organizations send money abroad for development purposes. Unlike official development assistance (ODA), these tax-expenditure funds are privately organized and distributed, yet unlike voluntary transfers they are paid for by the public fisc. This is not private aid; it is privatized aid. At the same time that direct expenditures on aid were falling in recent decades, these tax expenditures were rising.

    The basic, descriptive goal of this Comment is to show how nonprofit tax policies have shaped the content of American aid. The broader goal is to connect this insight with the literatures on tax expenditures and international development. If one accepts the Comment’s theoretical premise, then U.S. government spending on aid is somewhat larger, and substantially different in character, than most commentators have assumed. Although tax expenditures on foreign aid raise a number of concerns, they also, I contend, possess unique virtues that make them a valuable complement to ODA.

  • Spotlight_1_1Myron Grauer (Capital)

          • B.A. 1971, Vermont
          • J.D. 1975, Pittsburgh
          • LL.M. 1980, Yale

                      

              

          Grauer My career path has been one of turning failure to reach my teenage ambitions into the greatest job a law-trained person could ever hope for (and perhaps, just as Al Gore claims responsibility for the existence of the Internet, I can claim credit for the existence of TaxProf Blog and the TaxProf email listserv.

          Now, I have to admit that being a teacher had always been my ambition; it just wasn’t being a law teacher. No, my goal as a teenager was to be both a ski instructor and a comic actor and theatre teacher.

          (more…)

        • Law Prof Consultants

          Interesting article in this week’s National Law Journal:  More Law Profs Consult at Firms; But Moonlighting Can Raise Red Flags, by Leigh Jones:

          [Laurence] Tribe is just one of many high-profile legal scholars who have outside jobs with law firms in addition to working as full-time faculty members. The positions not only provide professors with a little cash, but they also provide a little cachet to law firms that can tout the scholar’s expertise as a mark of distinction. Law school administrators say they like the idea of professors obtaining some real-world experience, but they also want to make sure their schools are getting their money’s worth from faculty members….

          Ohio State University Michael E. Moritz College of Law Professor Douglas Berman [and editor of our sister Sentencing Law & Policy blog] worked with O’Melveny & Myers on sentencing issues in the criminal case against former Enron Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling, and he is eager to do more consulting with private law firms. He said that because faculty pay lags woefully behind law firm partners’ pay, consulting with law firms is a way to get compensated for his brainpower. He charged O’Melveny about $350 an hour for his services, he said. "A lot of it is a market reality," Berman said, adding that consulting also provides professors with welcome variety. "As you get more senior and more accomplished, writing law review articles is even more unsatisfying."

        • Paul Caron

          IRS Computer Tapes with Sensitive Taxpayer Information Are Missing

          Irs_logo_34826 IRS computer tapes containing sensitive taxpayer information are missing in Kansas City, and officials fear that millions of taxpayers are at risk of becoming victims of identity theft.  The tapes contain taxpayer names, addresses, social security numbers, bank account numbers, and employer information.  The tapes were sent to Kansas City in August as part of an information sharing agreement between the IRS and the city tp help the city collect its 1% earnings tax, and Kansas City officials lost track of the tapes in December.  For further details, see:

        • Paul Caron

          American Accounting Association Meeting Papers Available on SSRN

          Accounting_1The Management Accounting Section of the American Accounting Association has placed on SSRN the papers from its 2007 Midyear Meeting held on January 5-6, 2007.  The 36 papers are available here.

        • Paul Caron

          Chodorow Presents Tithing and Tax Reform Today at Notre Dame

          Chodorow Notre_dame_1Adam Chodorow (Arizona State) presents God’s Income Tax: What Jewish Tithing Practices Can Teach Us about Tax Reform today at Notre Dame as part of its Faculty Colloquium Series.  Here is the abstract:

          Tax reform and religion were two of the hot button issues during the last election. While at first glance these issues seem unrelated, a number of scholars have argued that religious values should guide our decisions regarding tax reform. This article posits that the relationship between religion and taxes is even stronger than has previously been suggested. People have been tithing for thousands of years. When they determine the amount of the tithe based on their income, the practice amounts to a religious income tax, or, more precisely, God’s income tax.

          (more…)

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