Category Archives: Default
Financial transactions taxes et al
Here’s the abstract:
Upcoming NYU event on Kim Clausing’s “Open”
It’s open to the public, and info about attending is available here. Info about the book is available here, and you can buy it from Amazon here. I may post comments about the book on this blog, after the session.
Here is a basic description:
Globalization has a bad name. Critics on the left have long attacked it for exploiting the poor and undermining labor. Today, the Right challenges globalization for tilting the field against advanced economies. Kimberly Clausing faces down the critics from both sides, demonstrating in this vivid and compelling account that open economies are a force for good, not least in helping the most vulnerable.
A leading authority on corporate taxation and an advocate of a more equal economy, Clausing agrees that Americans, especially those with middle and lower incomes, face stark economic challenges. But these problems do not require us to retreat from the global economy. On the contrary, she shows, an open economy overwhelmingly helps. International trade makes countries richer, raises living standards, benefits consumers, and brings nations together. Global capital mobility helps both borrowers and lenders. International business improves efficiency and fosters innovation. And immigration remains one of America’s greatest strengths, as newcomers play an essential role in economic growth, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Closing the door to the benefits of an open economy would cause untold damage.
Instead, Clausing outlines a progressive agenda to manage globalization more effectively, presenting strategies to equip workers for a modern economy, improve tax policy, and establish a better partnership between labor and the business community
Accessible, rigorous, and passionate, Open is the book we need to help us navigate the debates currently convulsing national and international economics and politics.
The Great Gatsby and the Great Gatsby curve
Death of Charles Kingson
Charley was a pillar of the NYC Bar, an important member of the NYU tax community, a serious thinker and writer, delightful company, and a greatly valued professional friend. I will miss him.
NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, week 6: Ruud de Mooij on profit-shifting (semi-)elasticities
Amazon’s zero federal income tax bill last year
Now, however, Matthew Yglesias has done me the favor of explaining how Amazon got its taxes down from over $2 billion (had it paid 21% on $11 billion) to zero
If this had happened in 2017 or earlier, net operating losses (NOLs) might have been the lead suspect, at least before one actually examined the evidence. Amazon had big losses for years, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong if a company (genuinely) loses $11 billion in Year 1, then earns $11 billion in Year 2, and pays no Year 2 tax by reason of the NOLs from Year 1. But ironically, the 2017 act effectively presumes that there would be something wrong here, as it limits NOL deductions to 80% of current year profits. This was presumably directed at optics, more than at substance, although note that the disallowed excess NOLs can be carried forward indefinitely.
Yglesias finds three main causes in the record for Amazon’s zero tax liability. The first is research and development (R&D) credits, which he notes get wide academic support, because research may yield positive externalities.
The second is temporary expensing for investing in equipment, which he notes is more controversial than R&D credits, but also gets some support across party lines. But I’d add two points here. First, expensing makes more sense when one is doing more than the 2017 act did to limit the tax benefit from effectively pairing it with interest deductions, which can cause debt-financed investment to be better than exempt. Second, there may have been a temporary transition effect insofar as, in 2018, Amazon was combining expensing for new equipment with continued depreciation for past years’ equipment. This overlap from the shift between regimes would be expected to diminish in future years as expensing remains in place. And if equipment expensing is indeed allowed to expire as currently scheduled, then in the first year after the expiration Amazon’s tax liability, relative to reported profits, might be unusually high (all else equal), by reason of the opposite regime shift.
The third cause for Amazon’s zero tax liability, despite its $11 billion in reported earnings, is that its surging profits, by driving up its stock price, increased its deductions for paying stock-based compensation to its executives. Yglesias explains why allowing the deduction may make sense from a corporate income measurement standpoint, leaving aside the corporate governance issues that may be associated with very high executive compensation, but I’d add one more thing. The $1 billion in stock-based compensation that he reports as having been deducted by Amazon presumably DID lead to significant tax liability on the executives’ part – indeed, one would presume, at a tax rate that was generally well above Amazon’s 21 percent corporate rate. So the paid-out $1 billion in profits was indeed taxed to someone, and perhaps at more than the U.S. corporate rate, unless there were tax planning machinations at the individual level.
Insofar as this $1 billion was taxed by the U.S. at the individual level at a rate above 21%, I’d view that as an entirely adequate substitute for Amazon’s being directly taxed on the same value.
NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, week 5: Susan Morse’s “Government-to-Robot Enforcement”
2001’s HAL, of course, wasn’t a robot, if one’s definition of the term requires creature-like embodiment. But he was enough like us to be capable of going mad. (For that matter, I once inadvertently gave an otherwise well-adjusted pet iguana a seemingly neurotic aversion to going into his water bowl when there were people around – he instinctually expected to be safe when he was in there, so was startled to find I’d just take him out of the cage anyway. I concluded that at least fairly intelligent animals – iguanas, surprisingly, qualify! – can develop neurotic aversions. But I digress.)
Yesterday’s colloquium guest, Susan Morse, presented an interesting paper that addresses how the rise of automation and centralization in legal compliance may transform the character of enforcement. These days, lots of tax filing involves the use of software – for example, Turbo Tax, H&R Block, TaxAct, Tax Slayer, Liberty Tax, and proprietary products that, say, a leading accounting firm might deploy with respect to its clients.
These programs, though hardly on the more sentient side of AI (unless one agrees with David Chalmers about thermostats) might nonetheless have their own versions of “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid you can’t deduct that.” An example that I’ve heard about, from a few years back, concerns Turbo Tax and how to allocate business vs. personal use regarding expenses that relate to a second home which one also rents out. By days of specific business versus personal use, or using a 365-day base? Apparently there are arguments for both approaches, but Turbo Tax either heavily steered people one way, or actually “refused” to do it the other way.
What’s more, they might offer an opportunity for centralized enforcement – for example, for the IRS’s directly collecting from Turbo Tax the taxes underpaid on Turbo Tax filings, at least where this reflected an error in the Turbo Tax program. The amount might be estimated, rather than calculated precisely as to each particular Turbo Tax-filed return.
In this scenario, if we assume that Turbo Tax isn’t going to try to get the money from individual filers (and note its current practice of holding customers harmless for extra taxes paid by reason of its errors or oversights), then in effect it will add expected IRS payouts into its prices, making it somewhat like an insurer.
The paper’s goal is not to advocate approaches of this kind, but rather to say that their increasing feasibility means we should think about them, and about the broader opportunities and challenges presented by rising automation and centralization, both in tax filing and elsewhere.
I myself have tended to see Turbo Tax, which I used until recently, as little more than a glorified calculator and form filler-outer. For example, it allows one to spare oneself the enormous nuisance of computing AMT liability (a real issue for New Yorkers pre-2017 act), or of having forgotten to include a small item until after one had already made computations based on adjusted gross income. So Intuit would really have had to screw up something basic, in order for Turbo Tax to have gotten my federal income tax liability wrong.
Nonetheless, especially if these programs become more HAL-like, but even just today when they offer a data and collection source, they can become important loci for federal enforcement and collection efforts. The paper notes, however, that there might be issues both of capture (Intuit manipulates government policymakers to favor its interests) and of reverse capture (Intuit, despite incentives to please customers that push the other way, decides on “I’m sorry, Dave” by reason of its relationship with the tax authorities).
Here’s an example that occurs to me – although I suspect it’s not actually true. New York State created certain charities, gifts to which qualify for an 85% credit against state income tax. Thus, if at the margin I can’t deduct any further state income taxes on my federal return, giving a dollar to such a charity costs me only 15 cents after state tax, but leaves me 22 cents after federal tax, if a full $1 charitable deduction is permissible and my federal marginal rate is 37%.
The Treasury has taken the view that, under these circumstances, my permissible federal deduction would only be 15 cents (i.e., the contribution minus the value of the state credit) – even though claiming simple state charitable deductions is not thus treated. But the Treasury might be wrong – i.e., it depends on what the courts ultimately decide, if the issue is litigated. Suppose, however, that Turbo Tax, which has you list the names of the charities to which you have given deductible contributions, in effect said “I’m sorry, Dave” once you had typed in the requisite name. This would in effect be reverse capture (although I doubt that Turbo Tax actually works this way, and it wouldn’t be hard for taxpayers to think of simple workarounds). It might impede taking the deductions, and then fighting the IRS in court if necessary, while using Turbo Tax.
One of the paper’s important themes concerns the relationship between (1) finding someone (such as tax sofrware providers) to serve an insurance function, and (2) being able to improve taxpayer incentives, at least in one particular dimension, by having no-fault penalties for underpayment of tax. (I wrote about this issue here.)
To illustrate the reasons for and problems with no-fault penalties, consider the following toy example: Suppose I can either owe $50 of tax with certainty, or else engage in a transaction the correct treatment of which is legally uncertain. If I do it and the issue is then resolved, there’s a 50% chance that I’ll owe zero, and a 50% chance that I’ll owe $100. So my expected liability is $50 either way – assuming that the latter transaction will definitely be tested.
In reality, however, what we call the “audit lottery” means that I can do the transaction, report zero liability, and be highly likely never to have it examined. Suppose that the chance of its being examined was as high as 50%. Even under that, probably quite unrealistic, scenario, my expected tax liability, if I do the transaction, is only $25. 50% of the time it’s never challenged, and 50% of the time when it’s challenged I win.
This is actually a pervasive issue in tax planning, inducing taxpayers to favor taking uncertain and even highly aggressive positions because they might never be challenged. The key here is that one generally won’t be penalized if one loses, if the position one took was sufficiently reasonable. A 50% chance of being correct would easily meet that threshold.
The solution to this incentive problem was stated long ago in work by Gary Becker concerning efficient crime deterrence. Suppose a crime one might commit has a $100 social cost. With certainty of detection, the Becker model advocates a $100 fine (leading, of course, to the notion that there are efficient crimes, e.g., one that I commit anyway because the benefit to me is $105). But then, Becker notes, there is the issue of uncertainty of detection. If there’s only a 50% chance that I would be caught, then the penalty, from this standpoint, ought to be $200.
Ditto for the above tax planning / audit lottery example. Given the 50% chance of detection, it all comes out right (in terms of ex ante incentives, ignoring risk) if we say that I have to pay $200, rather than $100, in the case where I am audited and lose. This is a no-fault or strict liability penalty, ramping up the amount I owe in order to reverse out the incentive effects of the audit lottery.
But what about the fact that I apparently did nothing wrong, yet am being penalized? Surely it’s not unreasonable for me to take a position that has a 50% chance of being correct. And we don’t currently require that taxpayers flag all uncertain positions in their tax returns – partly because the IRS would never be able to check more than a small percentage anyway. While I’m not being sent to jail here, there is an issue of risk. But before turning to that, consider one more path to the same result: Steve Shavell’s well-known work concerning negligence versus strict liability.
Shavell doesn’t have a multiplier for uncertainty of detection in his simplest model (although I’m sure he deals with it thoroughly somewhere). But he notes that strict liability produces more efficient outcomes than negligence where only the party that would face the liability is making “activity level” choices. E.g., if drivers don’t have to pay for the accidents they cause unless they’re negligent, they’ll drive too much, by reason of disregarding the cost of non-negligent accidents. (It’s more complicated, of course, if, say, the pedestrians they would hit are also deciding on their own activity levels.)
Returning to tax uncertainty, the problem with a negligence standard for underpayment penalties is that it leads to an excessive “activity level” with respect to taking uncertain positions that might be wrong yet remain unaudited. Strict liability is therefore more efficient than negligence at this margin, unless we add to the picture the equivalent of activity-level-varying pedestrians. For example, we might say that the government’s losing revenues from uncertainty plus < 100% audit rates gives it an incentive to try to reduce uncertainty. But I don't personally find that a very persuasive counter-argument in this setting. Okay, on to the problems with strict liability tax penalties. Let’s suppose in the above toy example that my chance of being meaningfully audited on this issue was only 5%. Then the optimal Becker-Shavell penalty is twenty times the under-payment, or $2,000. Add a few zeroes and, say, a $10,000 tax underpayment (as determined ex post) leaves me owing $200,000. Or, if the chance of a meaningful review was 1%, the short straw leaves me owing $1 million – even though we may feel I did nothing unreasonable. (Again, the disclosure option, while in special circumstances required under existing federal income tax law, can’t go very far given the costliness of review – which is itself a further complicating factor for the analysis.) If I am risk-averse, the burden this imposes on me may yield deadweight loss (other than insofar as we like its deterring me). From an ex post rather than ex ante perspective, it leads to particular outcomes that we may find unpalatable. A further, but lesser, problem is that it may be hard to compute audit probabilities accurately. Note, however, that requiring negligence is equivalent to presuming a 100% audit chance, in cases where it would not be found. From that perspective, multipliers that are still “too low” but greater than 1.0 at least do something to improve incentives around uncertainty and the audit lottery. So the risk problem arguably weighs more heavily against strict liability than the difficulty of getting the multiplier just right. This is where insurance comes in. The above problem goes away if taxpayers with uncertain positions can and do transfer the risk, for an actuarially fair price, to counterparties that can price and diversify it properly. But tax insurance is not widely available, and is hard to price. Hence the potential appeal of recruiting entities (such as Turbo Tax) that sit in a centralized position, if doing so doesn’t create overly bad problems such as adverse selection or moral hazard. (Adverse selection is inevitably an issue, however, if not all taxpayers use entities that can be recruited to serve, in effect, as insurers.) One further issue, in this regard, on which the paper touches is the feasibility of a system that would, say, charge Turbo Tax for user underpayments that reflected factual inaccuracies in the data that one entered. Can we even imagine a system in which, if I used Turbo Tax and left out a $10,000 cash payment that someone had made to me, it was liable?
The answer would seem to be no, but actually it’s a bit more complicated. Consider car insurance. The insurer will typically pay for accident costs even if they’re completely the driver’s fault, reflecting wildly inappropriate behavior (such as driving drunk, running red lights, texting while driving, etc.), In other words, the insurer loses if the driver is negligent, even though negligence is under the driver’s control or at least influence.
How is such insurance coverage feasible? Well, it certainly creates moral hazard, but there are ways of addressing it, such as literal coinsurance (such as ffrom deductibles and copays), implicit coinsurance (such as from collateral psychic or other accident costs to the driver that aren’t covered), and future years’ insurance rates that will now presumably be higher. So it’s feasible to have at least some car insurance for negligent drivers, despite the issue of moral hazard.
By extension, we could conceivably have a model in which Turbo Tax was liable, at least in part, even with respect to factual errors made by its customers, so long as analogous mechanisms sufficiently addressed moral hazard. But this still of course leaves the problem of mandatorily drafting software providers to serve as insurers by imposing no-fault collective liability, if strict liability doesn’t apply to taxpayers who file without using such providers.
Returning to the paper, it doesn’t purport to resolve any of these questions, but rather to begin laying out and addressing them. This particular piece will be appearing shortly in the University of Illinois Law Review, but I’ll be looking forward to Morse’s further work in the area.
Tax Games article: law review version
It’s called “The Games They Will Play: Tax Games, Roadblocks, and Glitches Under the 2017 Tax Act,” and it’s available for download here.
The abstract goes something like this: “The 2017 tax legislation brought sweeping changes to the rules for taxing individuals and business, the deductibility of state and local taxes, and the international tax regime. The complex legislation was drafted and passed through a rushed and secretive process intended to limit public comment on one of the most consequential pieces of domestic policy enacted in recent history.
This Article is an effort to supply the analysis and deliberation that should have accompanied the bill’s consideration and passage, and describes key problem areas in the new legislation. Many of the new changes fundamentally undermine the integrity of the tax code and allow well-advised taxpayers to game the new rules through strategic planning. These gaming opportunities are likely to worsen the bill’s distributional and budgetary costs beyond those expected in the official estimates. Other changes will encounter legal roadblocks, while drafting glitches could lead to uncertainty and haphazard increases or decreases in taxes. This Article also describes reform options for policymakers who will inevitably be tasked with enacting further changes to the tax law in order to undo the legislation’s harmful effects on the fiscal system.”
Understanding Leukemia Marrow Transplant
When we talk about a bone marrow transplant, we are referring to a medical procedure. The procedure is done for replacing damaged bone marrow. The damage could have occurred because of chemotherapy, infection or certain types of diseases including leukemia and other forms of blood cancers. The procedure is about transplanting healthy blood stem cells. The blood stem cells move to the bone marrow where they start producing healthy blood cells and also assist in the growth of new marrow. Bone marrow is important for healthy blood cell production. It is spongy and fatty tissue which is located in the hollow of our bones. It is useful for generating red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets and other forms of cells.
What Happens In Leukemia
When a person suffers from leukemia, he or she is suffering from a form of blood cancer. These patients have a situation where the bone marrow does not produce enough healthy blood stem cells. Instead, it starts producing unhealthy stem cells which are of odd shapes, sizes, and other attributes. These stem cells start the process of giving birth to cancerous cells that start overwhelming the healthy cells. This leads to anemia and other related problems. Hence, patients suffering from leukemia need to have health stem cells in their body and this is where the role of bone marrow transplant becomes important.
Why The Need For Bone Marrow Transplant
As mentioned above, a bone marrow transplant is needed when the body is not in a position to produce the required amount of healthy blood stem cells. Unless the damaged blood stem cells are removed and replaced with healthy ones, the patient could slowly be slipping out of control and would most certainly die within a few months or a year at the most. Therefore, whenever a patient has been confirmed to be suffering from leukemia, Bone marrow donor match is considered to be one of the most important options.
The Risks Associated With Bone Marrow Transplant
There is no doubt that BMT or match for bone marrow donation Transplant is a major medical procedure and there are risks involved in it. The patients could exhibit quite a few symptoms and these include nausea, headache, and drop in blood pressure, shortness of breath, pain in the body, fever and unexplained chills during the summer season and a host of other such problems. Therefore these risk factors must be weighed against the benefits and your doctor or specialists are the right person to take a call on this.
There are other factors which also should be taken into accounts such as the age of the patient, his or her overall health, the disease for which the patient is being treated, and the type of transplant that is required. Here again, your doctor or the specialist handling the case is the best person to decide as to whether you are the right candidate for a bone marrow transplant.
The Final Word
In fine, there is no doubt that leukemia, like all other forms of cancer, is a dangerous ailment. However, if a diagnosis is made accurately and at an early stage, it is curable with the help of bone marrow transplant and other methods of treatment.
Contact US:
Gift of Life Marrow Registry
800 Yamato Rd suite 101
Boca Raton,
FL
Phone: (800) 962-7769