The tax system is one of the most reformed and most discussed system from the economic systems in any economy. As it comes to taxes everyone is an expert as we all pay them. The last decades are going under the influence of the flat tax. Numerous countries adopted the idea of the so called flat...

In July, 2011, the Budgetary Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress convened an international symposium on reform of China’s Personal Income Tax (PIT) system. Currently about 30 years old, the Chinese PIT system very roughly resembles the U.S....

Australia’s general anti-avoidance rule permits the revenue authority to strike down transactions which occurred and the tax consequences they generated. This is the easy step. The harder task is the next step because the rule seems to require speculation about what might have happened...

Against a backdrop of ongoing angst regarding release of tax guidance, an important idea has surfaced in the tax compliance literature. Prominent tax compliance scholars have argued that the strategic use of tax law uncertainty may cause taxpayers to report higher tax liability. While these...

Federal tax law has long provided a tax benefit for charitable contributions of easements for conservation purposes. A fundamental problem with this conservation easement tax expenditure is that the measure for the tax benefit – lost economic development value – is erroneous. Use of such an...

This article considers the recent experiment in the “principles-based drafting” of tax legislation in the UK, in the light of the experience in Australia during the last 8 years. The article examines the genesis of this experiment in the tax re-writing projects that started in the 1990s, the...

The article reviews the history of the tax treatment of charitable split interest gifts, explains the inequities that Congress both cured and generated in its 1969 reforms, and proposes solutions that are consistent with the goals of the 1969 legislation. The article discusses variations in the...

Although section 529, under which tax preferred college savings accounts may be established, was enacted to alleviate the large financial burden of paying for a taxpayer's family members' higher education, it has provided taxpayers with the potential for additional income, gift, and estate tax...

Sometimes a case offers practice pointers: Hurford is one such case. Besides explaining what not to do (that is, what was actually done in the case), the Tax Court continually commented on what the decedent and her family might have done to improve their chances of success. The taxpayers in this...

Virtually everyone in this country is directly affected by the material in this chapter. Whether you are single, married, cohabitating with someone of the opposite or same sex, a child, an elderly person, someone going through a divorce or separation, rich or poor, there are numerous tax issues...