The need to determine whether a taxpayer is engaged in a “trade or business” arises frequently. Although the term “trade or business” is used throughout the IRC and the associated regulations in the Code of Federal Regulations, it is not defined explicitly. In some ways this is...

The Chemoil tax dispute provides an opportunity to explore the relationship between the economic substance doctrine and unprofitable transactions that are rendered economically viable by tax credits. Chemoil raises a particularly interesting point of contention. Transactions that generate...

The debt-versus-equity question is largely relegated to the common law. The central inquiry is the “extent to which the transaction complies with arm's length standards and normal business practice.” The courts have established a list of recurring factors to determine whether a transfer...

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...

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...

In the constitutional moment known to Canadians as Confederation, in 1867 the UK Parliament passed the British North America Act, 1867 (now known as the Constitution Act, 1867), thereby creating the Dominion of Canada. From the time of Confederation, there have been, broadly speaking, two sets...