In a variety of contexts, taxpayers can file tax elections that dictate their tax treatment. After filing or not filing a given tax election, a taxpayer might later feel regret. Perhaps the taxpayer lacks adequate information about the election's existence or tax effects at the time the taxpayer...

The IRS faces the monumental task of verifying, to the extent possible, the tax consequences reported on the hundreds of millions of tax returns filed each year. It does so with meager and shrinking resources. Some taxpayers burden the filing system more than others. At one extreme, a taxpayer...

Rebuttable presumptions are scattered throughout the Internal Revenue Code and the Treasury Regulations. In many cases, they are employed in service of determining a taxpayer's motive or state of mind. They are not, however, always utilized when motive or state of mind must be assessed. In some...

Under current law, when a partner sells a partnership interest, the resulting gain or loss is treated as capital gain or loss, except to the extent that the partnership holds certain items whose sale would result in gain or loss that was not capital. The purpose of the current regime appears to...

This Article will address tax law's inconsistent treatment of gains and losses – focusing in particular on certain instances in which a taxpayer is prevented from shifting a built-in loss to another taxpayer but would be allowed to shift a built-in gain to another taxpayer. The article will...

One well established feature of tax law is that, oftentimes, substance prevails over form. In other words, the substance of a transaction will determine the transaction's tax consequences. For instance, tax consequences will not depend solely on the label that a taxpayer assigns to a given...

Publicly traded entities are generally treated as corporations for U.S. tax purposes. Under various exceptions, however, publicly traded entities may obtain special treatment if they earn predominately certain specified types of qualifying income. This Article examines potential rationales for...

This Article highlights a flaw in the existing rules regarding partnership tax allocations that has not yet received sufficient attention by existing literature. Namely, the partnership tax allocation rules are implicitly premised on the assumption that partners are unrelated and, thus, transact...

Safe harbors pervade tax law. Yet, the academic literature offers no comprehensive account of why they exist. This Article begins to fashion that account by developing a theoretical framework for understanding the functional purposes that safe harbors serve. In order to analyze safe harbors'...

In general, business entities are subject to the section 11 corporate tax if they are publicly traded. Corporate tax is justified under the rationale that entities will pay tax in exchange for access to an established market because liquidity has value. It allows owners of large enterprises to...