Each year, the government loses hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue due to underreporting by individual taxpayers. According to standard deterrence theory, policymakers should be able to reduce tax evasion by increasing tax penalties, raising the audit rate, or some combination of the...

Should nonprofit charter schools be considered "charitable" under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and be entitled to the benefits that go with that designation (income tax exemption, charitable contribution deduction, etc.)? Current tax law treats them as such; the question is...

Tax compliance in the United States historically hovers in the 80 percent range, costing the nation approximately half a trillion dollars annually in uncollected tax revenue. To foster greater tax compliance, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) should employ whatever tools are at its disposal....

The thesis of this article is that the tax expenditure concept is grounded on an erroneous vision of the structure of an income tax system. The tax expenditure concept adopts a binary view of income taxation. It posits that there is an ideal or pure income tax system whose provisions are...

If a taxpayer borrows money, the borrowed funds are not included in the taxpayer's gross income. That treatment is proper even though the taxpayer has increased his assets by the amount he borrowed since he has also has created a corresponding liability to pay back the loan. The taxpayer's net...

In an earlier article titled as ‘Service Tax on Lawyers: A levy short lived?' [Excise and Customs Reporter Vol. 191(4), pp. 55SF-60SF] I had an occasion to point out that the levy of service tax on individual lawyers was an experiment out of the various experiments conducted by the Government...

The history of ever expanding horizon of service tax law in India has extensive sub-chapters of its own. The levy being unique and unprecedented in the country, the Finance Act, 1994 has made a number of experiments for the levy and collection of service tax from various sectors. Sometimes owing...

Twenty-five of the nation's leading tax academics, practitioners, journalists, and public intellectuals gathered in Malibu, California on the Friday before President Obama's second inauguration to plead for tax reform. The papers published in this issue of the Pepperdine Law Review provide very...

The receipt of workplace fringe benefits has become increasingly ubiquitous. As a result of their employment, employees often receive a cornucopia of fringe benefits, including frequent-flier miles, hotel rewards points, rental car preferred status, office supply dollar coupons, cellular...