{"id":3132,"date":"2021-10-15T11:43:04","date_gmt":"2021-10-15T15:43:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www2.law.temple.edu\/10q\/?p=3132"},"modified":"2021-10-15T11:43:04","modified_gmt":"2021-10-15T15:43:04","slug":"making-tax-law-work-improvisation-and-forgotten-taxpayers-in-partnership-tax","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.temple.edu\/10q\/making-tax-law-work-improvisation-and-forgotten-taxpayers-in-partnership-tax\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Tax Law Work: Improvisation and Forgotten Taxpayers in Partnership Tax"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>There is a growing awareness that federal tax law caters to a small number of wealthy and well-advised taxpayers without regard for the rest of the taxpaying public, and partnership tax is a prime example. Complexity and indeterminacy have transformed partnership tax, harming millions of forgotten taxpayers who struggle to comply with their annual filing obligations. A root cause of this phenomenon is the professional culture of elite practitioners, policymakers, and scholars at the heart of the partnership tax system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The most troublesome provisions of partnership tax are also its most fundamental\u2014namely the allocation rules that regulate how partners share a partnership\u2019s taxable items. Complexity is a universal problem faced by partnerships at all levels of wealth, status and sophistication, and the vast majority of taxpayers respond with improvisational tax compliance. Indeed, in remarkably diverse contexts, improvisation has replaced technical compliance as the norm in partnership allocations. Wealthy partnerships make a strategic choice to improvise, using \u201ctarget allocations,\u201d while poorer partnerships improvise because they have no other choice, routinely following \u201cintuitive\u201d tax law and hoping for the best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Reframing this complexity problem as a shared experience of all partnerships exposes the technical and cultural fractures of partnership tax in a new and different light. First, the technical rules governing partnership allocations do not work as designed for any category of partnership. A second, less explored problem is the professional culture of partnership tax, which takes for granted the technical sophistication of substantive tax law without appreciating the distributional consequences of sustained complexity and improvisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Partnership allocations require more than technical solutions. One necessary step is addressing the professional culture of partnership tax to rethink what it means for tax law to work. Partnership reforms developed by experts and directed at wealthy and well-advised partnerships should be accompanied by reforms addressing parallel problems faced by forgotten partnerships. The solutions will necessarily differ, but a bilateral focus on the universal problems of all partnerships would represent meaningful progress, signaling a commitment to a fair, principled, and representative system of partnership tax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Professor Monroe\u2019s paper can be downloaded in its entirety <a href=\"https:\/\/papers.ssrn.com\/sol3\/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3838058\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/law.temple.edu\/contact\/andrea-monroe\/\">Andrea Monroe<\/a> is a Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of law.&nbsp; Her areas of scholarly research include partnership taxation, federal income taxation, and complexity and the law.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Professor Andrea Monroe explores the technical and cultural forces that have transformed substantive tax law for millions of taxpayers who struggle when filing their annual returns.  Partnership tax offers a stark illustration of the fractures that have been caused by the normalization of complexity in tax law. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":62,"featured_media":3133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,8,9],"tags":[2332,2333,2334,2335,10,479],"coauthors":[2068],"class_list":["post-3132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-law-practice","category-faculty-authored","category-tax","tag-annual-returns","tag-elitism","tag-improvisation","tag-partnership-tax","tag-tax-law","tag-taxpayers","masonry-post","generate-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-33"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Making Tax Law Work: Improvisation and Forgotten Taxpayers in Partnership Tax - The Temple 10-Q<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/law.temple.edu\/10q\/making-tax-law-work-improvisation-and-forgotten-taxpayers-in-partnership-tax\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Making Tax Law Work: Improvisation and Forgotten Taxpayers in Partnership Tax - The Temple 10-Q\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Professor Andrea Monroe explores the technical and cultural forces that have transformed substantive tax law for millions of taxpayers who struggle when filing their annual returns. 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