VIRTEU Roundtable #3: Whistleblowing, Reporting, and Auditing in the area of taxation

by Diane Ring

We do not yet live in a world in which taxpayer compliance can simply be assumed. Instead, we must rely on the interplay of reporting requirements, internal and external auditing, and ultimately whistleblowing, to help ensure compliance with the tax system. How do they fit together? What can we expect from reporting and auditing? When do they breakdown, and why? How does whistleblowing–both the actual cases and the “threat” of whistleblowing–shape law, taxpayer behavior, and society’s understanding of compliance. And when does this tax noncompliance intersect with government corruption and fraud? What recommendations and options might we consider for the future?

Next week, the VIRTEU Roundtable Series tackles these questions in its 3rd Roundtable: “Whistleblowing, Reporting and Auditing in the area of taxation.” (VIRTEU [Vat fraud : Interdisciplinary Research on Tax crimes in the European Union]). This session builds on the first two Roundtables which gathered experts from around the world to discuss tax crime, corruption, CRS, and business ethics, and which can be viewed online: (1) Roundtable #1: Exploring the Interconnections between tax crimes and corruption; and (2) Rountable #2: CSR, Business Ethics, and Human Rights in the area of taxation.

The 3rd Roundtable, on “Whistleblowing, Reporting and Auditing in the area of taxation,” will be held Friday February 26, 2021 at 5:30-7:00pm GMT (12:30-2:00pm EST). For more information on the panel, see below. To join us, visit the registration link here.

Why Tax Losses Matter (for Pres. Trump’s Taxes and Everyone Else’s)

By: Leandra Lederman

Tax losses pose a special problem for the federal fisc. I’ll get to that in a minute, but first some set-up as to how tax noncompliance differs on the income side versus the deduction and credit side. The overall purposes of this post are to address some questions I’ve gotten and pull together some tax enforcement themes that are implicated by the recent NY Times reporting on Pres. Trump’s returns.

The Importance of Third-Party Reporting

A lot of tax noncompliance occurs with respect to income. Not for folks with mainly wage and salary income who maybe earn a little bit of interest from a bank account. All of that is reported by third parties (the payors) to the IRS, on information returns like Form W-2 or Form 1099. The taxpayer/payee receives a copy the information return and that both simplifies reporting and communicates what information the IRS has about the transaction. As Joe Dugan and I argue in a forthcoming article, third-party reporting is very effective. With the IRS able to do simple return matching to catch any incorrect reporting (intentional or otherwise), IRS figures like this bar graph show that there’s not a lot of noncompliance where there’s substantial third-party information reporting.

Where much tax noncompliance occurs is with respect to income earned by the self-employed and small businesses, where there’s much less third-party reporting and also more use of untraceable cash. (I added the red circle to the IRS image below.)

Continue reading →

More on Altera v. Commissioner

By: Leandra Lederman

Susan Morse and Stephen Shay have blogged on Procedurally Taxing on both May 22 and June 11 on Altera’s efforts to have the U.S. Supreme Court grant certiorari in Altera v. Commissioner. Altera is a closely followed case involving an administrative law challenge to the validity of a Treasury regulation, so I wanted to flag those blog posts for Surly Subgroup readers.

Recall that in Altera, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a cost-sharing regulation under IRC § 482, reversing the Tax Court’s unanimous decision invalidating the regulation as arbitrary and capricious. The Ninth Circuit ruled 2-1 for the government in both its original opinion, which was withdrawn due to the death of one of the judges on the panel, and again in a revised opinion. The Ninth Circuit also denied rehearing en banc, a victory for the IRS’s rulemaking process. (Full disclosure: in addition to joining in two earlier amicus briefs in favor of the Commissioner, which Susie and Steve spearheaded, I co-authored with them and Clint Wallace a 2019 amicus Brief in Opposition to the Petition for Rehearing En Banc.)

In February, Altera petitioned for certiorari, stating the following questions presented: Continue reading “More on Altera v. Commissioner” →

Updated Working Paper on Pandemic Regulation Includes Analysis of the CARES Act, H.R. 748

My co-authors and I (Hiba Hafiz, Shu-Yi Oei, and Natalya Shnitser) have just posted an updated version of our Working Paper, Regulating in Pandemic: Evaluating Economic and Financial Policy Responses to the Coronavirus Crisis. The Working Paper is revised and updated to incorporate the provisions of H.R. 748 (the “Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act” or the “CARES” Act) enacted into law on March 27, 2020. In addition, the revised draft considers recent action by the Federal Reserve, the Department of Labor, and other agencies all through the analytical framework we offer for evaluating these initiatives.

Do You Really Need More Information?

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.)

In a previous post, I explained with reference to the Cui 2017 paper on Third Party Information Reporting (TPIR) why I expect good quality TPIR, based on a primitive analysis of the human factor in corporate filings. When I started rereading Cui’s paper, I only read a few lines before a chapter heading from the CIA textbook “The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis” popped into my mind: Do you really need more information? That book contains a full chapter (starting on page 51) on how more information sometimes contributed nothing to the quality of the analysis, but was of immense help for the confidence of the analyst.

I will below make my argument for why the answer should be “yes” when it concerns the TPIR data mentioned by Cui in the paper, but it is a qualified yes. TPIR is a bit like cooking. Fantastic raw materials will not end up as gourmet meals on their own. You need a talented and skilled chef and a kitchen with the right tools, as well.

Having spent some time on capacity-building with less developed tax administrations than the Norwegian, I agree with Cui that establishing a TPIR machinery should not be the first priority in these countries. However, TPIR being the wrong starting point for some developing countries is not an argument for abstaining from it in Norway and other jurisdictions with better-resourced administrations. I will below state my case for why I find TPIR useful based on my observations working for the Norwegian Tax Administration (NTA) (which may of course differ from the opinions of the NTA itself). Continue reading “Do You Really Need More Information?” →

The Human Factor in TPIR Filing

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.)

I happened to reread a paper by Wei Cui from 2017 on Third Party Information Reporting (TPIR) some weeks ago. Based on my own practical experience working for the Norwegian Tax Administration, I found it hard to agree with him on uselessness of TPIR. In this post, I will explain why I expect good quality in TPIR filing. I plan to write a later post on why TPIR is useful.

I will start with crediting Cui for outlining very well what I will call “the story of the corporate tax revenue collection machine.” He does a good job describing how the government has outsourced the bulk of the revenue collection to corporations. I would love to see papers adding empirical numbers to this description. My Norwegian perspective is a world of VAT, corporations withholding taxes on wages and delivering massive amounts of data used to prepopulate the personal tax filings. The way Cui describe the role of the corporations in the “tax revenue collection machine” is probably even more spot on for me than for a reader with a US perspective.

As I read Cui, he expect legal entities to cooperate sufficiently to ensure fairly good quality TPIR. He does some reasoning on why this is to be expected, but I did not find his arguments very convincing. This may be because for some years I have had a different line of reasoning ending with the same conclusion. What follows is based on material I used in a talk some ten years ago for my colleagues at the Large Taxpayer Office in Norway. The theme of that talk was why we found less evasion in our segment of taxpayers than what other tax auditors found when auditing smaller entities. I called the talk “The Human Factor in Tax Filing”. I believe the reasoning I used there also may explain high quality TPIR. Continue reading “The Human Factor in TPIR Filing” →

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” →

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” →

Tax Evasion and the Fraud Diamond

By: Leandra Lederman Fraud Diamond image

There is an extensive set of literatures on tax compliance and evasion, often discussing the traditional economic model (the deterrence model) and/or behavioral theories such as social norms or tax morale. (For recent examples summarizing the theories, see this article by Kathleen Delaney Thomas, this one by Adam Thimmesch, or this one by yours truly.) There is also a separate accounting literature on fraud.

A key concept in this accounting literature is the “Fraud Triangle.” Yet despite the important role this theory plays within the accounting literature, the Fraud Triangle does not seem to have permeated the tax compliance literature, particularly the relevant legal literature.

For example, a search in “Secondary Materials” in Lexis for “‘fraud triangle’ w/50 tax!” turns up only one article, which is not a tax article but does cite a 2006 Tax Notes article authored by three CPAs. That article is James A. Tackett et al., “A Criminological Perspective of Tax Evasion” (paywalled). Yet, the Fraud Triangle should not be overlooked by scholars outside of accounting. It provides a powerful tool with which to conceptualize tax evasion. And, as discussed below, it helps provide a framework that both supports the deterrence model and allows other factors to coexist with deterrence.

The Fraud Triangle and the Fraud Diamond

The Fraud Triangle derives from three factors that criminologist Donald R. Cressey originally identified in a 1951 article in the Journal of Accountancy, “Why Do Trusted Persons Commit Fraud?: A Social-Psychological Study of Defalcators.” As discussed in his 1951 article and his 1953 book, “Other People’s Money: A Study in the Social Psychology of Embezzlement,” Cressey developed the factors that became the Fraud Triangle out of in-depth interviews with inmates who had been convicted of trust violations such as embezzlement. The three factors were labelled the “fraud triangle” by Steve Albrecht in the early 1990s. The elements of the Fraud Triangle, as discussed by Albrecht and others, are “perceived pressure” (usually financial), “perceived opportunity” to commit the fraud, and “rationalization” that the actions are justifiable or appropriate in the context of the situation. Albrecht and his coauthors of a 1979 KPMG study of convicted perpetrators of fraud “found that the decision to commit fraud is determined by the interaction of all three forces.” Continue reading “Tax Evasion and the Fraud Diamond” →

Increased Transparency in the U.S. Tax Court: Has the Moment Arrived?

By: Leandra Lederman CaptureDocketInquiry1

Transparency is a widely accepted judicial norm. It increases courts’ accountability and thereby increases the confidence and trust litigants and the general public have in courts’ decisionmaking. The comparatively limited access afforded to Tax Court documents is a longstanding issue. The reason Tax Court transparency differs from that of other courts is partly structural, in that the Tax Court isn’t as neatly situated in the federal government’s org chart as Article III courts, administrative agencies, or even Article I courts such as the Court of Federal Claims. (In fact, even which branch of government the Tax Court is located in has presented a puzzle.) Accordingly, the Tax Court traditionally has created many of its own rules and procedures, such as ones governing access to its documents. This means that the question is also partly cultural. As discussed below, access to Tax Court documents has increased over time, and the appointment of several new Tax Court judges may mean that we see further changes in the future.

In the past, the Tax Court’s more limited transparency has sometimes violated judicial norms and has sometimes created access inequities. For example, although the Tax Court is required by statute to make its reports and evidence “public records open to the inspection of the public,” for years the Tax Court kept its Summary Opinions confidential, which I protested in 1998 in a short Tax Notes article called “Tax Court S Cases: Does the ‘S’ Stand For Secret?”. Although Summary Opinions lack precedential value, they are Tax Court opinions, revealing how the judge deciding the case (typically a Special Trial Judge) thinks about the issues. The Tax Court’s practice of sharing those opinions only with the parties to the case meant that the IRS had a copy of every Summary Opinion but taxpayers typically could not access the opinions in other Small Tax Cases (S cases). This created an uneven playing field. Secrecy can also lead to suspicion of favoritism or other inequities, concerns that existed in an analogous situation, in the era when the IRS did not make Private Letter Rulings (PLRs) public but large firms collected them. Litigation challenging this lack of transparency resulted in legislation, requiring PLRs to be disclosed (with taxpayer information redacted). Continue reading “Increased Transparency in the U.S. Tax Court: Has the Moment Arrived?” →

A Series of Series? Tax, Regulation, and Faculty Workshops at Boston College Law School

I do love a good faculty workshop. Reading and spiritedly discussing the work of other academics always fills me with energy and inspiration for my own projects. Plus, it’s great to be able to spend time with new and old friends and find out what’s been baking in their brains.

Here at BC Law, I’m fortunate to be involved in two exciting workshop series: the BC Tax Policy Workshop and the BC Regulation and Markets Workshop. Both kicked off this week: On Tuesday, we hosted Professor Jens Dammann from the University of Texas at Austin and heard about his paper, “Deference to Delaware Corporate Law Precedents and Shareholder Wealth: An Empirical Analysis.” Today, we welcomed Professor Ajay Mehrotra (Northwestern Law; Executive Director, American Bar Foundation) and had a lively discussion of his book project, “The VAT Laggard: A Comparative History of U.S. Resistance to the VAT.” Tomorrow, BC Law will have its first Faculty Colloquium of the semester. Professor Guy-Uriel Charles (Duke Law; visiting at Harvard Law) will present “The American Promise: Rethinking Voting Rights Law and Policy for a Divided America.”

You can never have too many workshops!

Below are the dates and speakers for the remainder of the semester. If you’re a Boston-area law professor and are interested in attending or would like to be on our workshop email list, just let me know.

Tax Policy Workshop (Fall 2018):

Thursday September 13, 2018
Ajay Mehotra (Northwestern, and American Bar Foundation):
The VAT Laggard: A Comparative History of US Resistance to the VAT
(co-sponsored with BC Legal History Workshop)

Tuesday November 6, 2018
Andrew Hayashi (UVA): title TBD

Tuesday Nov. 13, 2018
Cliff Fleming (BYU): title TBD

Tuesday November 27, 2018
Emily Satterthwaite (University of Toronto): title TBD
(co-sponsored with BC Regulation and Markets Workshop)

Continue reading “A Series of Series? Tax, Regulation, and Faculty Workshops at Boston College Law School” →

Update on Altera

By: Leandra Lederman

I’m currently at the #SEALS2018 conference in Ft. Lauderdale, but I wanted to quickly note that the opinion of the 9th Circuit panel in Altera Corp. v. Commissioner was withdrawn today. This follows the replacement of Judge Reinhardt, who passed away on March 29, with Judge Graber. Recall that the July 24 opinion in this important case reflected a 2-1 decision, with the late judge in the majority, as Christopher Walker and others had noted. (For my previous coverage of Altera, see here and here.)

A screenshot of the court’s order appears below. It will be interesting to see what happens after the new panel confers!

New Paper on Tax Legislative Process and Statutory Drafting

Shu-Yi Oei

For those readers in search of some light summer reading, Leigh Osofsky (UNC Law) and I have been working on a paper on statutory drafting, entitled “Constituencies and Control in Statutory Drafting: Interviews with Government Tax Counsels.” We finally got around to posting it on SSRN, here.

In the paper, we report findings from interviews we conducted with government tax counsels who have participated in the tax legislative process, in which we asked questions about various aspects of drafting and creating tax legislation. In addition to reporting our findings, we also discuss the implications of our research for statutory interpretation, tax system design, and the legislative process.

For readers interested in legislation, tax drafting, statutory interpretation, tax shelters, and the political process, the paper is probably worth a look. Feel free to contact either of us with comments.

Call for Papers: New Voices in Tax Policy and Public Finance (2019 AALS Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA)

The AALS Tax Section committee is pleased to announce the following Call for Papers:

CALL FOR PAPERS
AALS SECTION ON TAXATION WORKS-IN-PROGRESS SESSION
2019 ANNUAL MEETING, JANUARY 2-6, 2019, NEW ORLEANS, LA
NEW VOICES IN TAX POLICY AND PUBLIC FINANCE
(co-sponsored by the Section on Nonprofit and Philanthropy Law and Section on Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation)

The AALS Section on Taxation is pleased to announce the following Call for Papers. Selected papers will be presented at a works-in-progress session at the 2019 AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA from January 2-6, 2019. The works-in-progress session is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, January 5.

Eligibility: Scholars teaching at AALS member schools or non-member fee-paid schools with seven or fewer years of full-time teaching experience as of the submission deadline are eligible to submit papers. For co-authored papers, both authors must satisfy the eligibility criteria.

Due Date: 5 pm, Wednesday, August 8, 2018.

Form and Content of submission: We welcome drafts of academic articles in the areas of taxation, tax policy, public finance, and related fields. We will consider drafts that have not yet been submitted for publication consideration as well as drafts that have been submitted for publication consideration or that have secured publication offers. However, drafts may not have been published at the time of the 2019 AALS Annual Meeting (January 2019). We welcome legal scholarship across a wide variety of methodological approaches, including empirical, doctrinal, socio-legal, critical, comparative, economic, and other approaches.

Submission method: Papers should be submitted electronically as Microsoft Word documents to the following email address: tax.section.cfp@gmail.com by 5 pm on Wednesday, August 8, 2018. The subject line should read “AALS Tax Section CFP Submission.” By submitting a paper for consideration, you agree to attend the 2019 AALS Annual Meeting Works-in-Progress Session should your paper be selected for presentation.

Submission review: Papers will be selected after review by the AALS Tax Section Committee and representatives from co-sponsoring committees. Authors whose papers are selected for presentation will be notified by Thursday, September 28, 2018.

Additional information: Call-for-Papers presenters will be responsible for paying their own AALS registration fee, hotel, and travel expenses. Inquiries about the Call for Papers should be submitted to: AALS Tax Section Chair, Professor Shu-Yi Oei, Boston College Law School, oeis@bc.edu.

The Parsonage Allowance in Brief(s)

By Sam Brunson

I’ve blogged several times about the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s suit over the parsonage allowance.[fn1] Quick refresher: Section 107(1) allows “ministers of the gospel” to exclude church-provided housing from their gross income, while section 107(2) allows them to exclude housing stipends. The Freedom From Religion Foundation sued and won in the district court. The Seventh Circuit found that FFRF didn’t have standing, so two of its executives claimed a refund for the portion of their salary that had been designated a housing allowance and sued again. Again, the district court held that section 107(2) was unconstitutional.[fn2]

Now we’re in the briefing stage. And a week and a half ago, the government and intervenors filed their most recent briefs in Gaylor v. Mnuchin.

I’m not going to analyze the full briefs, but I do want to respond to a central point that the government mentions, and that the intervenors find critical in their opening brief: the idea that the parsonage allowance is part of a series of provisions that relax the default exclusion rule. Continue reading “The Parsonage Allowance in Brief(s)” →