Introduction The IPO parade of 2019 is making the early shareholders of technology startups such as Uber, Lyft, Slack, and Pinterest (among others) staggeringly wealthy. Now that these companies are publicly traded, equity owners can easily cash out at a huge profit. As shares of stock, this profit would normally be taxed at long-term capital […]
Tax
Tax fraud costs the federal government billions of dollars annually. Qui tam litigation, which features individuals bringing lawsuits on behalf of the government, is a powerful tool for the government in its fight against many types of fraud. The False Claims Act, the federal government’s most potent qui tam mechanism, however, expressly excludes tax fraud from its scope. Recognizing this gap in coverage, the Internal Revenue Service has...
Because of the importance of technological innovation to economic growth, nations strive to stimulate and attract the research and development (“R&D”) that leads to that innovation and to make themselves hospitable environments for the holding of intellectual property (“IP”). Tax policies have taken center stage in their efforts to accomplish these goals and to capture a share of the income from technological innovations.
Designing...
The economic substance and step transaction doctrines are two specific examples of courts’ general willingness to sometimes look past transactions’ technical form and impose taxes based on their underlying substance. As judicial creations, the two doctrines served as complements and functional equivalents. However, they also generated a wide variety of vague, overlapping, and conflicting formulations.
In 2010, Congress incorporated...