The Internal Revenue Code is riddled with features that allow U.S. taxpayers to reduce their federal tax liability by operating through tax haven companies. Some of these provisions are historic anomalies. Others are better understood as inadvertent loopholes than considered legislative grace....

[This testimony was delivered on December 8, 2021, to the House Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Oversight, as part of a hearing on "The Pandora Papers and Hidden Wealth."]The US is the world’s leading investment destination for offshore wealth. Our laws enable foreigners—through...

This paper, written for a European conference on tax and corporate governance, evaluates two aspects of the U.S. legal response to corporate tax shelters: the civil penalty rules and the disclosure rules. It argues that, while the disclosure rules do not impose undue burdens, their usefulness to...

This paper examines the application of the economic substance doctrine in determining whether a business transaction is a sham and argues that the court in Black & Decker v. United States incorrectly applied the economic substance doctrine before it expressly resolved issues requiring statutory...

This article discusses the task of identifying controlled transactions under review by the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. In particular, it aims to alert courts as to the necessary role of contractual interpretation law in determining the true nature of such controlled transactions

Professor William Byrnes examines whether it is prudent for taxpayers to trust the governments of the 117 countries that scored a fifty or below on Transparency International's corruption index. The complete information system invoked by the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) encourages,...

Bilateral intergovernmental agreements (IGAs) relating to the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and entered into by the U.S. government reduce the reach of FATCA's withholding tax regime, including the reach of that regime as applied to non-U.S. taxpayers. The validity of these IGAs has...

This paper outlines and examines the taxation implications (primarily income tax) for residents of the United Kingdom (UK) and Australia also citizens and permanent residents of the United States (US) who are employed overseas. In addition to identifying specific taxation implications for...

This National Report was prepared for the 2014 Annual Congress of the European Association of Tax Law Professors, which took place in May 2014 at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey. This National Report discusses administrative and legal mechanisms, especially the Foreign Account Tax Compliance...

This National Report was prepared for a conference titled Tax Secrecy and Tax Transparency – The Relevance of Confidentiality in Tax Law, which took place in July 2012 in Rust, Austria and was co-hosted by the Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law at the Vienna University of...