Common Control and the Delineation of the Taxable Entity

This Note proposes a solution to what has been one of the most vexing problems in state corporate taxation and in multijurisdictional taxation generally: the delineation of the scope of the entity that an individual jurisdiction is entitled to tax. Starting from the observation that the federal government already aggregates the income of commonly controlled groups of corporations to prevent them from taking advantage of the lowest tax brackets multiple times, this Note proposes that states “piggyback” on these efforts and allow the federal government thereby to shoulder the burden of delineating the taxable entity