This brief case comment explains how the Supreme Court’s very narrow hunt for individual clues in Bittner v. United States, 598 U.S. __ (2023), led it to misinterpret a statute penalizing certain persons for failing to report properly their foreign bank accounts. Had the Court instead removed...

This essay, to be included as a chapter in a volume on corporate taxation, briefly reviews U.S. efforts to achieve corporate tax integration, focusing especially on the Civil War years when enduring problems first surfaced and Congress approved four integration approaches in three years. The...

When Stanley Surrey died in 1984, the school of thought sometimes known as the “new textualism” that has gained such influence in the United States over the last three decades had not yet emerged. Surrey would have been very interested in this development. As revealed in his recently...

This brief essay, adapted from remarks delivered to the Tax Policy and Simplification Committee of the ABA Tax Section on October 2, 2020, describes needed changes in three tax privacy areas: access and disclosure of presidential tax information, civil enforcement of congressional subpoenas, and...

This essay attempts to connect the process and product of tax legislation. It argues that changes in the tax legislative process over the last 25-30 years have affected the type of legislation produced by Congress. After identifying several developments, including the changing composition of...

In 1926, Congress created the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) and its staff. This article explains how, partly by design but largely by happenstance, the JCT staff helped change the nature of the legislative process. By serving at or near the intersection of three great divides in government...

Controversies like the "Freedom Fries" dispute between the United States and France over Iraq suggest that nationalistic tensions can disrupt international trade. We use a natural experiment to investigate this possibility. Building off recent research that uses international sports as a source...

This submission is the testimony provided to the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee in February 2019 on the ability of the chairman of the committee to obtain and disclose the tax return information of any taxpayer including the president. It describes the controlling law, the...

During debate on the 2017 tax bill that was once slated to become the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” the number of stories referencing an arcane budget law known as the “Byrd rule” skyrocketed in publications as diverse as the New York Times and the weekly trade magazine, Tax Notes. Many of...

This paper briefly explains why the IRS’s adoption of an abbreviated application form (Form 1023-EZ) for organizations seeking recognition of their tax exemption under section 501(c)(3) results in a misuse of scarce compliance resources in the exempt organization area