The economic substance doctrine is intended to prevent taxpayers from engaging in transactions that have no substantive purpose other than to obtain a tax benefit. As one of the judicially-created substance-over-form doctrines, its meaning is almost entirely derived from the series of court...

We use machine-learning models to analyze and anticipate the outcome of the IRS’s appeal of the Tax Court's decision in Cross Refined Coal LLC v. Commissioner, No. 19502-17 (2019) (bench op.). We predict that the D.C. Circuit will hold that the taxpayer had been carrying on a partnership...

This article considers the judgment of the D.C. Circuit in Cross Refined Coal, which addressed whether a business venture that was guaranteed to be unprofitable pretax could still be considered a bona fide partnership for federal income tax purposes. In previous work, we analyzed the Tax...

In this article, we provide general observations about how tax practitioners are beginning to learn how to leverage the insights of machine learning to “crack the tax code.” We also examine how tax practitioners are using machine learning to quantify risks for their clients and ensure that...

Several months ago, we examined the Tax Court’s decision in Reserve Mechanical and predicted with 77 percent confidence that the taxpayer’s appeal would be dismissed and the Tax Court’s decision affirmed. The Tenth Circuit has now made that prediction accurate. In its decision, the Tenth...

Since the ISA's overarching theme for this conference is norm diffusion, we will address a specific, dual issue -- foreign-investment protection agreements (FIPAs), which governments adopt when they ratify these documents, and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) processes, which establish...

In the context of the failure of the World Trade Organization (WTO)'s Doha Round, a proliferation of bilateral, state-to-state trade and investment negotiations is taking place in parallel and sometimes in conflict with the strengthening phenomenon of regionalization. After having adopted a...

This study examines the issue of tax neutrality of the income tax treatment of credit swaps in Canada in domestic context. It analyzes the applicable tax regime consisting of rules on tax characterization, timing and tax rates through the lenses of symmetry, consistency and certainty approaches....

Despite its complexity and the harsh reception the Canadian Goods and Services Tax (GST/HST) was greeted with at its inception in the early 1990s, the story emerging from Canada's value-added tax (VAT) experience is mostly a happy one. Indeed, a majority of the provinces will soon have replaced...