This paper describes and analyzes an investment strategy that, when combined with simple Roth IRA conversion planning, can substantially reduce the tax costs of Roth conversions. The strategy leverages, through the combination of volatily and negative correlation, the put option feature inherent...

Current law allows businesses that sell services or receive rents or royalties to pay tax on the receivables only when they are collected. Exclusion of receivables under current law allows ‘‘tax floats,'' under which the customer or client immediately deducts the liability but the recipient...

For the past 30 years, the conventional wisdom has been that executive compensation packages should include very large proportions of incentive pay. This incentive pay orthodoxy has become so firmly entrenched that the current debates about executive compensation simply take it as a given. We...

This article analyzes Internal Revenue Code sect; 162(m), which in general denies public companies a deduction for annual non-performance-based compensation in excess of $1,000,000 paid to senior executive officers. Congress enacted sect; 162(m) with the intent to reduce the overall level of...

In a deeply divided Washington, one of the few issues on which leading lawmakers on both sides of the aisle appear to agree is that corporations should be discouraged from buying back their stock from shareholders. This short article argues that, while this anti-buyback sentiment is misguided,...

The 2017 Tax Act was the most sweeping federal tax legislation in over a generation. While many of its reforms, from dramatically lowering the corporate tax rate to altering the international tax rules, have already received significant attention, little attention has been paid to the 2017 Tax...

On July 23, 2015, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Treasury Department (Treasury) issued proposed regulations under section 707(a)(2)(A) of the Internal Revenue Code (the Code) relating to disguised payment-for-services transactions between partnerships and partners. These are my comments...

Residential solar systems are becoming commonplace in many regions of the United States. Use of such systems raises issues in tax doctrine and policy that are not well appreciated and have not yet been systematically analyzed. The goals of this article are threefold: (1) to identify the main...

In an earlier article (The Untold Story of Sun Capital: Disguised Dividends, 142 Tax Notes 556 (2014)), I argued that in many cases monitoring fees paid by private-equity controlled companies should be recharacterized as nondeductible dividends. This recharacterization would increase the tax...

The income tax is technologically very similar to the way it was in its early years, and technological developments have been at the margins of the income tax and have not affected its core elements. Still, technological improvements have made third-party reporting and withholding more...