The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of interactions with IRS employees on tax practitioners' attitudes toward the IRS. The mission of the IRS is to inspire the highest degree of public confidence as it collects the proper amount of tax revenues at the least cost to the public. The IRS believes it must project a favorable image to tax practitioners in order to foster a high level of support for its mission. Prior surveys of tax practitioners found that practitioners have generally unfavorable attitudes toward the IRS and its employees. This study examined whether the unfavorable attitudes result from interactions with IRS employees, and provides empirical evidence of the effects of interactions with IRS employees on tax practitioners' attitudes toward the IRS.

Le Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act est une réglementation américaine issue du Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act adopté par le 111e Congrès américain le 18 mars 2010. Cette réglementation instaure un système de communication automatique d’informations financières à des fins fiscales adossé à un mécanisme de retenue à la source d’un montant de 30% sur des paiements de source américaine faits à des institutions financières étrangères ou à certaines entités non-financières étrangères qui ne respecteraient pas les obligations de déclaration mise en place. La résonance de la loi FATCA est globale et la réglementation touche aussi bien les personnes américaines que les bénéficiaires étrangers et notamment les banques ainsi que les fonds d’investissement. La finalité de la réglementation n’est toutefois pas de permettre à l’Internal Revenue Service (administration fiscale américaine) de collecter la retenue à la source de 30% mais de contraindre les entités étrangères, sur lesquelles il n’a aucune juridiction, à transmettre les informations nécessaires à l’identification des détenteurs de comptes américains. Résolument bilatéral, la loi FATCA a ouvert la voie à une nouvelle forme de lutte contre l’évasion et la fraude fiscales vers les centres financiers offshore et fût émulée rapidement par l’OCDE lequel a institué son propre standard, la Norme commune de déclaration, s’inscrivant dans une logique multilatérale. Pourtant, le risque résulte de l’interaction de ces deux instruments, faisant notamment des États-Unis un véritable trou noir dans un réseau international de coopération administrative fiscale pour les contribuables non-résidents sur le territoire américain / The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act is an American law spawned by the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act enacted by the 111th Congress of the United-States on March 18th, 2010. FATCA imposes a system of automatic information reporting, seconded by a 30% rate withholding tax on US source payments made to foreign financial institutions and some identified non-financial foreign entities that do not comply with the reporting obligation. FATCA has developed a worldwide resonance and affects US persons as well as foreign payee and especially foreign banks and investment funds. The purpose of FATCA is not however to allow the IRS to collect the 30% withholding tax but rather to force foreign entities, over which the IRS does not have jurisdiction, to comply with their reporting information and allow for the IRS to obtain the required documentation regarding their US account owners.Fundamentally bilateral, FATCA’s regime has paved the way towards a new system of control of international tax fraud and evasion towards offshore tax havens and was quickly emulated by the OECD which created its own system, fundamentally multilateral: the Common Reporting Standard. However, it’s the interaction between the two systems that creates an unfortunate outcome, turning, for non-US taxpayers, the United-States into a black hole in the global transparency network created by the countries in an effort to fend off tax evasion

The purpose of this research was to examine the United States population of plans with over 100 participants to determine the extent of the reaction away from defined benefit plans resulting from the 1986 and 1987 legislation.

The recent massive shift by Americans into investment funds and the attendant rise of a core group of institutional shareholders has transformed the financial market landscape. This dissertation explores the economic and policy implications associated with this shift to intermediated capital markets. The underlying assumption has always been that the growing presence of institutional investors in capital markets would improve the corporate governance of their portfolio companies, thereby reducing managerial agency costs and increasing firm value. My research explains why the reality deviates from that ideal. Using two novel perspectives—tax and antitrust—this dissertation reveals the disruptive effects and market distortions associated with the rise of institutional ownership. Chapter 1 of this dissertation, Common Ownership: A Game Changer in Corporate Compliance, explores the effect of overlapping institutional ownership of public companies by institutional investors on corporate tax avoidance. Leading scholars now recognize that this type of “common ownership” can change company objectives and behavior in a way that may lead to economic distortions. This chapter explores one unexamined peril associated with such common ownership: the effect of this core group of institutional investors on the tax avoidance behavior of their portfolio companies. I show how common ownership can lead to a reduction in those companies’ tax liability by means of a newly recognized phenomenon I call “flooding.” This term describes a practice by which different companies that are owned by the same institutional shareholders simultaneously take aggressive tax positions to reduce their tax obligations. Due to the IRS’s limited audit capacity, this synchronized behavior is likely to overwhelm the agency and substantially reduce the probability that tax noncompliance will be detected and penalized. This outcome runs counter to the classic deterrence theory model (which assumes that the threat of enforcement deters noncompliance) and demonstrates how common ownership changes the way public firms approach legal risks. By revealing the systematic compliance distortion and attendant enforcement challenges that ensue when the same investors “own it all,” this chapter also highlights a hidden social cost of common ownership. Under the domination of common institutional investors, companies can more easily shirk their taxes, reducing U.S. tax revenues by billions. Ironically, many of these same investors proclaim themselves as socially responsible stewards of the companies they own, attracting millions of individual investors who factor Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues into their investment decisions. Corporate “flooding” affords an instructive example of the weakness of so-called ESG investment model. To mitigate the detrimental effect of common ownership on corporate tax compliance, this chapter proposes a double sanctions regime, whereby institutional investors would be penalized along with their portfolio companies for improper tax avoidance. Such a regime may help restore deterrence and may incentivize institutional investors to keep their social promises. Chapter 2 of this dissertation, The Agency Tax Costs of Mutual Funds, unveils another tax-related pitfall associated with what some scholars term the “separation of ownership from ownership” problem in intermediated markets. In such markets, retail mutual fund investors cede investment and voting decisions to institutional investors who manage the funds. As a result, actions undertaken unilaterally by financial intermediaries dictate the tax liability of passive individual investors. This chapter argues that the tax decisions of institutional investors are often guided by their own tax considerations rather than by the tax considerations of the beneficiaries who own mutual funds through conventional taxable accounts. Due to the pass-through tax rules that govern investment funds, these beneficiaries, unlike the institutional investors (who are compensated based on pre-tax performance), are tax-sensitive. These diverging incentives give rise to a new type of an agency costs problem. These agency tax costs arise from the institutional investors’ trading decisions, corporate stewardship activities, and their preferences in the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) context. I argue that the structure of M&A deals, the method of payment used in such deals, and even the premiums paid to sellers in such deals are distorted because the votes of passive tax-sensitive retail investors are cast by tax-insensitive institutional investors. As a result, institutional investors not only fail to replicate the tax outcomes that tax-sensitive investors could have achieved had they owned stock directly, but they also distort corporate voting outcomes for all stakeholders—even those with unmediated investments. This chapter proposes several options for mitigating agency tax costs, including mandatory separation of funds based on the tax profile of the beneficiaries, heightened tax disclosure by mutual funds, decentralization of votes in mutual fund sponsors, and pass-through voting systems. These alternatives would reduce the agency tax costs of mutual funds without imposing new agency costs on tax-insensitive shareholders who also rely on institutional investors for portfolio management. The agency tax costs problem undermines the traditional assumption that mutual funds and their individual investors have the common goal of maximizing returns. My research reveals that this underlying assumption is flawed, as it overlooks the tax rules that govern investment funds and the way these rules shape the economic incentives of mutual funds managers and advisors. These incentives create a conflict of interest between institutional investors and their tax-sensitive investors, which has been largely overlooked. The analysis of the agency tax costs problem also illuminates the ways in which the rise of financial intermediaries has impacted the tax behavior of public corporations, which in turn, has affected the tax liability of investors in capital markets. While this result has significant implications for market participants and society at large, the paths through which these effects occur and their underlying economic rationales have received little attention. This chapter addresses this scholarly gap by examining the role of corporate governance structures as well as the role of tax law and policy in shaping the tax incentives of the most powerful market actors in the U.S. economy. Chapter 3 of this dissertation, The Corporate Governance Cartel, offers a novel antitrust perspective on a growing phenomenon in capital markets that has accompanied the rise of institutional ownership: institutional investor coalitions. Traditionally, corporate law has regarded such coalitions as desirable, a solution to the well-known collective action problem facing public shareholders. In this chapter, I challenge that view by revealing the anticompetitive risks that investor coalitions pose. This chapter shows how investor coalitions can emerge at the border between firms and markets, affecting not only the intra-firm governance arrangements of the companies held by the coalition members—but capital markets as well. At the firm/market border, cooperation among institutional investors, even around seemingly benign corporate governance issues, provides an opportunity for tacit collusion among these investors in the markets in which they compete. To illustrate this problem, I use an antitrust lens to analyze the collective efforts of institutional investors to restrict the use of dual-class stock in initial public offerings (IPOs). This original account of the coalition against dual-class structures exposes the significant anticompetitive effects that may arise at the IPO juncture when competing buyers of shares in the primary market coordinate their response to a governance term. Since the members of the coalition collectively possess most of the expected market demand for public offerings, their joint efforts can be seen as an exercise of buyer-side power. The exploitation of such power effectively creates a cartel of buyers in the primary market, resulting in two potential economic distortions: (1) abnormal underpricing of dual-class offerings, and (2) suboptimal governance arrangements. Both distortions reveal overlooked perils associated with the massive aggregation of power by institutional investors. In my antitrust analysis of investor coalitions, I also focus on institutional investor consortiums, trade associations that promote governance principles on behalf of their institutional members, which notably are on the rise. In analyzing these consortiums, this chapter draws upon antitrust rules relative to standard-setting organizations and explores how these anticompetitive risks are exacerbated by these investor consortiums. Finally, this chapter proposes immediate regulatory responses aimed at preventing institutional investors from engaging in collective actions that limit competition. The suggested policies represent a means to resolve the delicate tension between the goal of corporate law to encourage collaboration among shareholders and the goal of antitrust law to restrict cooperation among competitors.

The Taxpayer Service Division contributes to the Internal Revenue Service mission of achieving the highest possible voluntary compliance with the Federal income tax law by answering questions and helping taxpayers in their return preparation efforts. These services are provided by Taxpayer Service Representatives and Taxpayer Service Specialists (TSS's). The TSS position was established in 1975 to upgrade the quality of assistance provided. TSS duties include being able to provide assistance with problems involving complex areas of the tax law. The purpose of the study was to disclose to what extent TSS's are called on to answer tax questions related to partnerships, corporations, and Subchapter S corporations and to disclose whether they have been trained and are able to answer the inquiries.

Tax evasion is a serious issue that influences governmental revenues, IRS enforcement strategies, and tax policy decisions. While audits are the most effective method of enforcing compliance, they are expensive to conduct and the IRS is only able to audit a fraction of the returns filed each year. This suggests that audits alone are not sufficient to curb the billions of dollars of tax evaded by taxpayers each year and that a better understanding of factors influencing compliance decisions is needed to enable policymakers to craft tax policies that maximize voluntary compliance. Prior research tends to model compliance as economic, environmental, or personal decisions; however, this study models it as a multifaceted decision where these three perspective individually and interactively influence compliance. It is the first to decompose perceived detection risk into two dimensions (selection risk and enforcement risk) and investigates how these two dimensions of risk, decision domains (refund or tax due positions), and three personal factors (mental accounting, narcissism, and proactivity) influence taxpayers’ compliance decisions. I conducted a 2x2 fully crossed experiment involving 331 self-employed taxpayers. These taxpayers have opportunities to evade that employed taxpayers do not. For example, they can earn cash income that is not reported to the IRS by third parties. For self-employed taxpayers (especially those wanting to evade), perceived selection and enforcement risks may be distinctly different depending on a taxpayer’s situation, what they believe they can control, and what risk they are willing to accept. For example, selection risk may be perceived as the greatest risk for those with unreported items on their return, while enforcement risk may be more prominent for those perceiving certain levels of selection risk. Thus, I believe self-employed taxpayers are the most appropriate population to sample from and are likely have reasonable variation in the three personal factors of interest. I find that taxpayers do differentiate between selection and enforcement risks but the difference only manifests for taxpayers in certain decision domains. Taxpayers in a refund position (i.e. conservative mindset) had a greater sensitivity to the form of payment (cash vs. check) and appeared to use this information to make inferences about enforcement risk which was significantly different from their perceptions of selection risk. Conversely, tax due taxpayers (i.e. aggressive mindset) appeared to overlook the form of payment and did not assess these two risks as significantly different. Evaluating the full sample suggests that both selection risk and enforcement risk have a positive influence on compliance. Further, these risks interact to influence compliance. Specifically, compliance is greatest when taxpayers perceive a high likelihood of being selected for an audit and enforcement risk only matters when selection risk is low. This finding is interesting and suggests that avoiding interaction with the IRS is a primary objective of taxpayers. In line with my findings of taxpayers perceiving different risks in refund and tax due positions, the influence of risk perceptions on compliance differed for taxpayers in these positions. Refund taxpayers were influenced by both selection and enforcement risk, similar to the full model; however, tax due taxpayers were only influenced by selection risk and appeared to completely overlook enforcement risk when making their reporting decision. Lastly, the study shows that personal characteristics can also influence compliance in the presence of economic and environmental determinants, but some characteristics only manifest in specific decision domains. Of the three personal characteristics investigated, only mental accounting orientation was a significant predictor for the full sample. When the sample was split by decision domain, only proactivity was a predictor of compliance for refund taxpayers, while only mental accounting orientation was a predictor of compliance for due taxpayers. While I did not find results for narcissism and compliance, my subsequent analysis suggests that individual dimensions of narcissism may be better predictors of compliance than the full measure. Specifically, the exploitation dimension was a significant predictor of compliance for those in a tax due position. This study make several contributions to the accounting and tax literatures. First, this study provides support for a two-construct conceptualization for perceived detection risk that includes both selection and enforcement risks. Second, it answers calls to investigate more comprehensive compliance models and finds economic, environmental, and personal characteristics individually and interactively influence compliance. Third, this study investigates three personal factors that have not been investigated in the tax compliance literature. Finally, this study answers calls for research on self-employed taxpayers and suggests that the IRS will be more successful in increasing compliance by playing on taxpayers’ aversion to being selected for an examination than communicating information on the IRS’ ability to detect noncompliance during an examination.

The purpose of this study was an empirical investigation of the factors considered by the United States Tax Court in determining whether the principal purpose for an acquisition was tax avoidance (or alternatively, given the totality of the surrounding circumstances, whether there was an overriding business purpose for the acquisition).

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Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-25T18:39:58Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Edson Sampaio de Lima .pdf: 1538632 bytes, checksum: 82758dbf3b4358ba821b7e785e4026ac (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-12-09 / The Public System of Digital Bookkeeping SPED was developed with the aim of enabling greater integration between the tax administrations themselves then between them and taxpayers through the use of technology and, consequently, the socioeconomic standard, in a unique environment, raising tax collection efficiency and ultimately reducing the costs of administration and compliance. The purpose of this research was to examine whether public investment directed to the establishment and maintenance of the project actually resulted in a reduction in the costs of tax compliance temporary and permanent. The random Survey method was not used as a mechanism for data collection. The questionnaire containing 22 questions was sustained in the forecasting model of regulatory impact developed and applied by the Australian Taxation Office ATO in your country, adapted to identify reduction in compliance costs related to three specific organizational aspects: People, Technology and Contracting Services Consulting. The questionnaire was emailed to 20 people with executive position or managers directly involved in the project in SPED size businesses and distinct segment. Responded to the survey 20 of the 20 companies. The data collected were analyzed through descriptive and exploratory, in the latter case using the cluster analysis. The survey approach has met both the qualitative and the quantitative research. The results indicate that the SPED caused an increase in compliance costs temporary and permanent, mainly due to the implementation strategy defined and applied solely by the public administration. The analysis also allowed evidence that public investments directed to the implementation and maintenance of SPED comparatively similar to private investments directed to the same end, which shows a tendency to shift costs of administration for compliance costs for taxpayers / O Sistema Público de Escrituração Digital SPED foi desenvolvido com o fito de possibilitar maior integração entre as próprias administrações tributárias, depois entre elas e os contribuintes, através do uso de tecnologia e, consequentemente, de dados socioeconômicos padronizados, em um ambiente único, elevando a eficiência arrecadatória e, finalmente, reduzindo os custos de administração e de conformidade. O propósito desta pesquisa foi analisar se os investimentos públicos direcionados ao estabelecimento e manutenção do projeto realmente resultaram em redução nos custos de conformidade tributária temporários e permanentes. O método Survey não aleatório foi utilizado como mecanismo de levantamento de dados. O questionário desenvolvido contendo 22 questões foi apoiado no modelo de previsão de impacto regulatório desenvolvido e aplicado pela Australian Taxation Office ATO em seu país, adaptado para identificar redução nos custos de conformidade relacionados a três vertentes organizacionais específicas: Pessoas, Tecnologia e Contratação de Serviços de Consultoria. O questionário foi enviado por email a 20 pessoas com cargo de direção ou gerência diretamente envolvidos no projeto SPED em empresas de tamanho e segmento distintos. Responderam à pesquisa 20 das 20 empresas. As informações coletadas foram analisadas sob a ótica descritiva e exploratória, neste último caso utilizando-se da análise de cluster. A abordagem de pesquisa realizada atendeu tanto à pesquisa qualitativa como a pesquisa quantitativa. Os resultados obtidos indicam que o SPED provocou aumento dos custos de conformidade temporários e permanentes, sobretudo, devido à estratégia de implementação definida e aplicada unicamente pela administração pública. A análise também possibilitou evidenciar se os investimentos públicos direcionados para a implantação e manutenção do SPED são, comparativamente, semelhantes aos investimentos privados direcionados para o mesmo fim, o que demonstra tendência de transferência dos custos de administração para os custos de conformidade dos contribuintes