Tax and Changing Labor Markets: The OECD Weighs In

By: Diane Ring

Across the globe, policy makers are wrestling with the possibility that the nature of work is changing and that those changes might be positive or negative. One of the most prominent changes identified is the rise of “non-standard” work, essentially work that is not part of a traditional employer-employee relationship. The rise of the gig economy, and perhaps its even greater growth in the public imagination, have fueled concerns about the prospect of disappearing employment and its replacement with less stable and less desirable non-employee work options.

The degree to which this shift is taking place is an empirical question which has been difficult to pin down. As my co-author Shu-Yi Oei and I have explored in our paper, Tax Law’s Workplace Shift (forthcoming in the Boston University Law Review), data on the changing nature of work comes from empirical studies, which suffer from limitations due to the questions asked, the terminology employed, and comparability of studies over time and across databases. But regardless of any precise conclusions on the rate at which work is changing, there are valid reasons to be concerned and inquire about the impact of tax law on any such shifts. The OECD has begun to weigh in on these questions, releasing a new working paper entitled Taxation and the Future of Work: How Tax Systems Influence Choice of Employment Form, by Anna Milanez and Barbara Bratta (March 21, 2019).

The OECD Project

In this paper, the OECD tackles the question of whether tax considerations may be driving any increases in non-standard work. Using three labor scenarios—traditional employee, self-employed worker, and incorporated worker (e.g., a personal services corporation)—the paper asks how the tax burdens change across the three labor scenarios in eight test countries (including the United States).

In particular, the paper measures the “tax payment wedge” in each labor scenario in each country.

Payment wedge = total employment costs minus worker take home pay total employment costs

where total employment costs equal take home pay, income tax, employee social security contributions, employer social contributions, and payroll taxes minus any cash transfers (i.e. cash payments from the government to the worker, such as those made with respect to dependent children).

What did the OECD find across these eight test countries? Continue reading “Tax and Changing Labor Markets: The OECD Weighs In” →

Jussie Smollett and the Illinois Film Tax Credit

By Sam Brunson

On Tuesday, Joe Magats, first assistant state’s attorney for Cook County, announced that he was dropping the charges against actor Jussie Smollett. Instead of a trial and punishment, Smollett agreed to forfeit his $10,000 bond and do community service.

Cook County prosecutors say this is a relatively normal type of alternative prosecution, one that prosecutors have recommended for over 5,700 offenders. It allows prosecutors to use their resources to prosecute violent offenders.

Not surprisingly, there’s some outrage about this alternative prosecution, notably from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and CPD Superintendent Eddie Johnson. But this is a tax blog, not a criminal justice blog, so questions about the justice (or not) of dropping Smollett’s prosecution are outside of our usual scope. Which is why I’m going to focus, instead, on Illinois Representative Michael McAuliffe and his terrible, horrible, no good, very bad bill. Continue reading “Jussie Smollett and the Illinois Film Tax Credit” →

Lead us not into temptation

By Gaute Solheim, Senior Tax Advisor, Norwegian Tax Administration

(Mr. Solheim writes in his individual capacity and does not purport to represent the views of the Norwegian Tax Administration.)

The Norwegian Tax Administration (NTA) has succeeded in leading most of the taxpayers away from the temptation of tax evasion over the last two decades. Not all, but most. It was not by carefully guiding them down a narrow path. The NTA constructed a wide avenue built on large quantities of third-party information pushed into prepopulated tax filings. Norway tweaked details in the rules for the most used deductions, linking them to easy observable facts and standard rates instead of using actual cost. Feedback from audits were used to evaluate possible changes in rules, eliminating or reducing the temptations facing the taxpayer in the filing process.

After all this work, we still had a problem with taxpayers being formally non-compliant by not logging into the digital portal and clicking the button for submitting their prepopulated tax filing. The easy fix was to change the law. A taxpayer receiving the digital and prepopulated tax report would be deemed to accept it as his filing if he stayed passive. Presto, even more compliant taxpayers.

But, at least for internal use, the NTA retained the old division of taxpayers into those who want to comply and those who want to evade. The faithful and the sinners. What people want is hard to observe, and it is hard to design measures to influence what people want. The NTA kept it despite its actions being focused very much on making it irrelevant whether the taxpayer wanted this or that. Spending all my time auditing MNEs, I found it really hard to figure out the wants of a corporation. Continue reading “Lead us not into temptation” →

More on the College Admissions Scandal

By Sam Brunson

On Wednesday, I posted about how tax law played a central role in the college admissions scandal. As I’ve read through a little more of the affidavit, I decided to highlight two additional detail in this whole scandal, details that suggest that, for at least some of the participants, the tax consequences were very important.

Bruce Isackson and Facebook Stock

Bruce Isackson is the president of WP Investments, a real estate investment and development fund.[fn1] According to the affidavit, he used the fake athlete thing (soccer for the older daughter, rowing for the younger) to get two daughters into USC. He seems to have also paid for his younger daughter to get a better ACT score.

What’s interesting for purposes of this post is how he paid. Continue reading “More on the College Admissions Scandal” →

Key Worldwide Foundation and College Admissions Scams

By Sam Brunson

When I first read about the massive college admissions scam, I read it for roughly the same schadenfreude as everybody else. It was an interesting—and frankly, kind of pathetic—story of wealth and entitlement.

And then I read the affidavit supporting the criminal indictment. And I learned that, as much as this is a story of wealth and entitlement, it’s more than that: this is a story that revolves around taxes. And specifically, the abuse of a tax-exempt organization.

There seem to have been two main schemes to get participants’ kids into schools they wouldn’t have otherwise qualified for. The first involved cheating on entrance exams. The second involved bribing athletic directors and others to designate their kids as athletic recruits (often in sports the kids didn’t play), and , each of which had its own fee structure. But each scheme had something in common. The recipient of the payments was Key Worldwide Foundation. Continue reading “Key Worldwide Foundation and College Admissions Scams” →

IU Tax Policy Colloquium: Williamson, Filer Voter: An Experiment Testing Voter Registration at Tax Time

Left to right: Pamela Foohey, Leandra Lederman, Vanessa Williamson, David Gamage, Tim Riffle

By: Leandra Lederman

On February 28, Indiana University Maurer School of Law’s Tax Policy Colloquium, hosted this year by my colleague David Gamage, welcomed Vanessa Williamson from the Brookings Institution. Vanessa presented a report that is due to be released at the end of March on a “Filer Voter” experiment she conducted at Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) sites in Cleveland, Ohio and Dallas, Texas.

For those who may not be familiar with it, VITA is an IRS-run program that offers free tax return preparation (generally federal and state) for taxpayers who made $54,000 in income or less (for 2018) and meet certain other requirements. An IRS web page provides training materials and certification tests for volunteers. The IRS works with local groups in that it provides VITA grants to partner organizations. For example, in Bloomington, the VITA program is run by United Way of Monroe County.

Vanessa’s Filer Voter experiment involved offering some taxpayers who come to VITA sites for tax-return preparation the opportunity to register to vote. The experiment was structured as follows: Each VITA session was divided in half by time, and within each session, the first half or second half was randomly assigned the treatment of offering voter registration, and the other half of the session was the control. The study included collection of demographic information and consent forms from taxpayers in both the treatment and control groups. Continue reading “IU Tax Policy Colloquium: Williamson, Filer Voter: An Experiment Testing Voter Registration at Tax Time” →

A Mission From God: Blues Brothers and Tax

By Sam Brunson

On February 1, Amazon Prime Video started streaming Blues Brothers. Now, in spite of its being one of the great movies of the 20th century, and having one of the greatest soundtracks ever, I hadn’t seen it in years, and definitely not since I moved to Chicago. So I decided to watch it, both because I love the movie and because I wanted to see its view of Chicago now that I know this city.

I remembered that the plot revolved around Jake and Elwood trying to raise $5,000 for the orphanage they grew up in or the orphanage will be closed, but I’d forgotten that the $5,000 was to pay the orphanage’s property tax assessment:

I’d also never watched a movie with Amazon’s X-Ray feature before. And X-Ray announced that the motivation for their mission from God is a factual error, because Illinois doesn’t tax church property.

Is that true? Continue reading “A Mission From God: Blues Brothers and Tax” →