By: Leandra Lederman

On February 14, the Indiana University Maurer School of Law’s Tax Policy Colloquium hosted Larry Zelenak from Duke University School of Law. Larry presented his fun new paper, co-authored with his colleague Rich Schmalbeck, “The NCAA and the IRS: Life at the Intersection of College Sports and the Federal Income Tax.” Larry really hit this one out of the park, with a crowd that was nearly standing-room-only! Larry also hosted a terrific Valentine’s evening event, “Tax Sitcom Night,” featuring three classic sitcom episodes in which couples encounter the federal income tax together. I’ll discuss each of these briefly in this blog post.

Larry and Rich’s paper argues that the IRS has not done as much as Congress to cut back on “unreasonably generous tax treatment” of college athletics. The paper covers four principal topics, which Larry explained was a combination of Rich’s work on two issues and Larry’s on the other two. The four topics are:

• The possible application of the unrelated business income tax to college sports;
• the federal income tax treatment of athletic scholarships;
• the recently changed tax treatment of charitable deductions for most of the cost of season tickets to college ball games; and
• the new 21% excise tax of IRC § 4960 on compensation in excess of $1 million on certain employees of tax-exempt organizations.

Each of these topics is interesting in its own right, and together they make a strong case that the IRS, and Congress at times, have tilted the playing field in favor of college athletics at the expense of protection of the federal fisc. I won’t give a play-by-play of these four issues here, as the paper does a great job of it and is available on SSRN, but I will mention a couple of highlights. Continue reading “Zelenak: IU Tax Policy Colloquium, “The NCAA and the IRS” & Tax Sitcom Night” →