Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
The ABA Tax Section has written a 2-page letter to Congress opposing the IRS whistleblower rewards provision (section 488) of the Senate-passed JOBs bill (S. 1637). The ABA Tax Section is concerned that "the provision may impair rather than enhance tax administration."
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
Newmax.com (via TaxGuru) reports that Sen. Kerry’s choice of John Edwards for VP has renewed calls for Teresa Heinz Kerry to release her tax returns:
Now that he’s been tapped to be Sen. John Kerry’s running mate, Sen. John Edwards will almost certainly release tax returns on the millions of dollars he’s earned as a trial lawyer. And while there are not expected to be any problems in Edwards’ financial portfolio, the disclosure will put new pressure on Teresa Heinz Kerry to release her own returns, which campaign insiders regard as a more closely guarded secret than the nation’s nuclear launch codes. But party officials have to worry about the appearance of Kerry’s running mate coming clean about his personal financial details while the top of the ticket continues to stonewall on the same questions.
For prior TaxProf Blog coverage of this issue, see here, here, and here.
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
Brian Leiter examines law faculty moves at the top 18 law schools over the past five years and ranks the schools in five categories:
• Schools That Improved the Most: UCLA, Texas, Vanderbilt, Virginia, Yale
• Schools That Gained Some Ground: Columbia, Duke, Penn
• Schools That Broke Even: Georgetown, NYU, USC
• Schools That Lost Some Ground: Cal-Berkeley, Chicago, Harvard, Stanford
• Schools That Lost the Most Ground: Cornell, Michigan, Northwestern
Here are the Tax Prof moves that contributed to these results:
• Cal-Berkeley lost John McNulty
• Chicago lost Elizabeth Garrett
• Columbia lost Lawrence Zelenak
• Cornell lost Lilly Kahng
• Duke added Lawrence Zelenak
• Georgetown added William Bratton and Ethan Yale
• Harvard lost Diane Ring
• NYU added Lily Batchelder and lost Paul McDaniel
• Texas added Robert Peroni and lost Joseph Dodge
• UCLA added Steven Bank, Victor Fleischer, and Samuel Thompson, and lost Michael Asimow
• USC added Elizabeth Garrett
• Vanderbilt added Beverly Moran
• Virginia added Mitchell Kane
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
Anne Alstott (Yale) has published No Exit: What Parents Owe Their Children and What Society Owes Parents (Oxford University Press, 2004):
The book has an idea and a policy proposal. The idea is that parenthood is unique — different from other life choices — because parents bear an obligation not to exit their chosen way of life. For children’s sake (and society’s sake, too), parents must persist with their children for the long term, since only parents can provide the “continuity of care” that is critical to children’s development. Thus, parents should not exit their children’s lives, and society should expect them not to. But because this “no exit” characteristic of parenthood is economically costly for parents, and especially for mothers, society owes special consideration to parents’ economic plight.
The policy proposals include a $5,000 annual grant to every parent and new proposals for assistance to the parents of special needs children. The book also engages the debate over the effects of family-friendly workplace policies, which, I argue, are less fair and less effective than policies not linked to the paid workplace.
For a Boston Review symposium on the book, with articles by Robin West, Amy Wax, Dorothy Roberts, Richard Epstein, Deborah Stone, and Eva Kittay, as well as an article and response by Professor Alstott, see here.
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
Following up on last month’s post about the IRS’s 3-page letters to the presidential campaigns warning that it “will take whatever actions are necessary to stem abusive behavior” by churches that directly or indirectly participate in the campaigns on behalf of any candidate: the Washington Post reports that the Bush campaign is aggressively testing the limits of these rules by courting church involvement in the effort to re-elect President Bush. According to the Post “tax experts [Milton Cerney of Caplin & Drysdale (D.C.) & Rosemary Fei of Silk, Adler & Colvin (San Francisco)] said the campaign is walking a fine line between permissible activity by individual congregants and impermissible activity by congregations.” (Thanks to reader Steven Sholk for the tip.)
Wednesday, July 7, 2004
The Wall Street Journal reports on a new study by Criterion Research Group showing the companies that take the most aggressive accrual accounting stances are four times as likely to be sued by shareholders as less aggressive peers. An earlier study reported that such aggressive companies also under-perform their peers.
Tuesday, July 6, 2004
The West Coast has been atwitter about Coach Krzyzewski turning down $8 million per year for coaching the Lakers to remain at Duke. An article in Sunday’s LA Times noted that “[a]s a private institution, Duke doesn’t have to disclose faculty salaries, but Krzyzewski has been reported to earn between $600,000 and $800,000, making him the highest-paid university official above even Duke’s president.” Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.) sparked a discussion on the Tax Prof Discussion Group about how the reporter seriously underestimated Coach K’s Duke haul.
Professor Aprill unearthed Duke’s Form 990 on the Guidestar web site, which reports over $1.3 million in payments to Coach K:
• Compensation: $743,000
• Pension Contributions & Deferred Compensation: $65,000
• Expense Account and Other Allowances: $519,000
What exactly is that 500k expense account? The Form 990 instructions say this entry is to include “both taxable and nontaxable fringe benefits” and “expense allowances or reimbursement that the recipients must report on their separate income tax returns.” The instructions continue:
Examples include amounts for which the recipient did not account to the organization or allowances that were more than the payee spent on serving the organization. Include payments in connection with indemnification arrangements, the value of the personal use of housing, automobiles, or other assets owned or leased by the organization (or provided for the organization without charge), as well as any other taxable and nontaxable benefits.
My guess is the 500k number does not include the huge amounts Coach K likely gets from non-Duke entities like Nike (for using its sneakers) and local radio & TV stations (for appearances on weekly shows), but does include money for basketball camps at Duke. Duke Tax Prof Richard Schmalbeck offers another possibility:
Coach K does a lot of travel for recruiting, and he may prefer not to account for it through Duke so as not to be subject to our restrictions on things like first class plane tickets and the like. So he may just have a travel allowance that becomes gross income, subject to whatever deductions he can justify on his tax return. (He probably has enough miscellaneous itemized deductions that that isn’t a problem for him.)
(Coming on the heels of posts contrasting Tax Prof salaries with those of law firm summer associates and partners, we are not inaugurating a new feature on People Who Earn More Than Tax Professors — we do not have the space!)
Tuesday, July 6, 2004
SUNY-Buffalo alumni have raised a $75,000 endowment fund to honor retired Tax Prof Louis Del Cotto, who taught at the school for over 40 years. The Louis Del Cotto Fund for Excellence in Tax and Tax-Related Studies will support lectures by visiting tax faculty and practitioners, research by tax faculty, and scholarships for students intending to pursue tax careers. For more details, see here.
Professor Del Cotto is perhaps best well known for his two influential articles on Crane and Kirby Lumber:
• Basis and Amount Realized Under Crane: A Current View of Some Tax Effects in Mortgage Financing, 118 U. Pa. L. Rev. 69 (1969)
• Debt Discharge Income: Kirby Lumber Co. Revisited Under the “Transactional Equity” Rule of Hillsboro, 38 Buff. L. Rev. 777 (1990)
Professor Del Cotto’s Penn article was cited by the Supreme Court in Commissioner v. Tufts, and greatly influenced the chapters on Kirby Lumber and Crane in our Tax Stories book on the ten leading income tax cases.
Tuesday, July 6, 2004
TaxProf Blog posts over the long holiday weekend:
Saturday
• Tax Prof Spotlight: Pat Dilley
• New Book on Land Value Taxation in Britain
• Tribe Compares Iraqi Torture to Tax
Sunday
• Top 5 Tax Paper Downloads
• New D.C. Declaration of Independence
• Lithovski on Gregory and the History of Tax Avoidance Litigation
Monday
• Four U.S. Tax Profs Present Papers at U.K. Tax History Conference
• Extreme Makeover: Taxpayer Edition
• Sugin on Tax and John Rawls
Monday, July 5, 2004
Four U.S. Tax Profs are presenting papers today at the History of Tax Law Conference, Centre for Tax Law, University of Cambridge:
• Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan): Corporations, Society, and the State: A Defense of the Corporate Income Tax
• Steven Bank (UCLA): Entity Theory as Myth in the Rise of the Modern Corporate Income Tax
• Carolyn Jones (Dean, Iowa): Bonds and Voluntary Taxation During World War II
• Ajay Mehrotra (Indiana-Bloomington): Lawyers, Guns, and Public Monies: The U.S. Treasury, World War I, and the Administration of the Fiscal State
For Tax Analysts’ coverage, see here.
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