THE JAMES HAUSMAN TAX LAW & POLICY WORKSHOP
presents 

Omri Marian
University of California, Irvine School of Law

 IS ALL CORPORATE TAX PLANNING GOOD FOR SHAREHOLDERS? 

Wednesday, November 1, 2017
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park

Multiple commentators argue that corporate managers should engage in corporate tax planning. Underlying this argument is the assumption that reduced corporate tax liability enhances shareholder value. I explain why this common perception is frequently incorrect, and show that corporate tax reduction schemes may increase the overall tax burden on shareholders. I make the following descriptive arguments in this regard: First, I show that in many cases, successful (and legal) corporate tax planning schemes are not Pareto-optimal. Some classes of shareholders (generally, tax-exempt shareholders) may see a net benefit, while other shareholders (usually taxable shareholders) experience a net loss. Second, I show that in certain instances it is reasonable to expect that legal corporate tax planning will be overall inefficient. Meaning, the losses to taxable shareholders may exceed the gains to tax-exempt shareholders. Lastly, I show that because of an underappreciated agency problem, shareholders approve inefficient corporate tax plans, even when information about the potential detriment is freely available. The reason is that in U.S. equity markets tax-exempt shareholders, many times, hold the majority vote. Tax-exempt shareholders (unlike taxable shareholders) always stand to benefit from corporate tax planning. To secure management’s support for corporate tax-planning, tax-exempt investors also have an incentive to allow the corporation to compensate managers for any personal tax cost. In summary, tax-exempt shareholders and managers rationally (and legally) collaborate to reduce corporate taxes, by shifting the tax burden to minority taxable shareholders. There are important legal and normative implications to such outcomes: First, the fact that corporate tax planning can be detrimental to shareholders casts serious doubt on the argument that managers have a duty to engage in corporate tax planning. Second, the market dynamics I explore expose a shortcoming in U.S. corporate and securities laws, which allow (in fact, encourage) inefficient transactions to take place. Lastly, corporate tax plans that shift burden to taxable shareholders are unfair. Assuming government designed our tax system with particular distributive policies in mind, the corporate tax schemes I describe violate such policies through private actions that are not between willing parties. I explore several potential remedies to these problems, and conclude that the best course of action is to require that taxable shareholders vote as a class in all corporate transactions that result in shareholder tax liability.

Omri Marian is an internationally recognized expert in international taxation and comparative taxation. Before joining UC Irvine School of Law, he was an assistant Professor of Law at the University of Florida where he taught in the graduate tax program. He also practiced as a tax associate in the New York office of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. Professor Marian’s work has been cited by Congress and is frequently featured in financial media outlets.

A light lunch will be provided.

For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.

Do you like jokes? Do you have a sense of humour? Join the writing team for this year's Law Follies: Name TBD But Probably Some Corporate Sponsorship Because Who Are We Kidding! Make friends! Make enemies! Write jokes that will be brutalized by our editing team and then performed in front of your friends!

Our third meeting is Thursday November 16 at 12:30 in J130! Bring your sense of humour (and lunch, we're not made of money). Also feel free to submit pitches to the pitch collector: https://goo.gl/forms/VAZxVg0WnqRnrftR2.

The KAIROS Blanket Exercise: A Step on the Path to Reconciliation

• Engage on an intellectual and emotional level with five hundred years of Indigenous-Settler history in a 1.5 hour workshop

• Take on the roles of Indigenous people through pre-contact, treaty-making, colonization and resistance

• Gain a better understanding of how law was manipulated to steal land from and otherwise harm First Nation, Inuit and Métis people and how these historical wrongs are directly connected to the social, economic and legal issues many Indigenous people face today

• Learn how Indigenous people have resisted assimilation and how they continue to do so

For more information on the Blanket Exercise at U of T Law, you can watch a short video here: https://youtu.be/81-EeMg47Jo

For more information about the Blanket Exercise from KAIROS, creators of this resource, please visit their website here: https://www.kairosblanketexercise.org/

IMPORTANT INFORMATION!

• This exercise is for students, staff and faculty of the U of T Law School only.

• Only register for one date, please!

• If you have questions, please contact Amanda Carling, Manager, Indigenous Initiatives: amanda.carling@utoronto.ca

Register Now: 

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/blanket-exercise-at-u-of-t-law-fall-2017-tickets-38399797829

The Ethos of European Criminal Law

The development of EU powers in the field of criminal law has been, and remains to date, a contested enterprise from the perspective of both state sovereignty and the protection of fundamental rights. In looking at the Ethos of European Criminal Law, the presentation will cast light on the main challenges underpinning the evolution of European Criminal Law by examining closely four fundamental questions:  the ‘why’ question (why has supranational integration in the field evolved and what are the main legal interests upheld by Europeanisation); the ‘how’ question (how has Europeanisation occurred and what are the forms of governance in European criminal law); the ‘what’ question (what is the content of European criminal law); and the ‘for whom’ question (who is European Criminal Law entitled to address and/or protect). Answers to these questions will lead to an analysis of the Ethos of European Criminal Law placed within the broader EU and domestic constitutional context.

Valsamis Mitsilegas
Queen Mary University of London
Professor of European Criminal Law, Head of the Department of Law and Dean for Research (Humanities and Social Sciences) 

Mon, Nov 6, 2017
03:00 PM - 05:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
Rm 200, Larkin Building

Mon, Nov 13, 2017
04:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Room 200, Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place

How have UK counter-terrorism laws and policies adapted to the phenomenon of ‘foreign terrorist fighters’? The question immediately engages the problem of who fits that description and whether the label is apt. For these purposes, the focus will be upon persons linked to conflict or terrorism in Iraq and Syria associated with the establishment and defence of Islamic State (Daesh). The UK’s law and policy responses, which have been amongst the earliest and most comprehensive of any country, involve a broad catalogue which covers: the formulation of strategy; criminal justice, policing and prosecution aspects of response; and non-criminal justice aspects of response, including travel and citizenship restrictions and the countering of violent extremism. The diversity of responses raises the issue of how to select between them and which should be given priority, including as applied to special cohorts such as minors. This presentation is based on recent work undertaken for the UK government and will seek to provide statistical and interview data to inform the analysis.

See the Munk Centre website for more information

Submissions are now being accepted for the 2018 CRTC Prize for Excellence in Policy Research!

Co-sponsored by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and the Canadian Communications Association (CCA), the Prize is awarded on an annual basis to graduate students and post-doctoral researchers whose work contributes to the advancement of research on emerging issues in communication studies.

The objective of the CRTC is to help ensure that Canadians have access to a world-class communications system. In order that its regulatory solutions may be innovative, relevant, and effective, it collaborates regularly with stakeholders both domestically and internationally to gather information on trends and policy issues in the communication landscape.

The CRTC Prize for Excellence in Policy Research seeks to encourage a new generation of researchers to contribute to Canada’s public policy development in this area. Canadian graduate students and post-doctoral researchers at universities in Canada and abroad are encouraged to submit papers on cross-cutting themes in Canadian information and communication policy studies.

The submission deadline for the 2018 Prize is:Friday, January 26, 2018

Prize offerings:

• Monetary awards in three categories:
  • o   PhD candidates: $2,500
  • o   Master’s degree candidates: $1,500
  • o   Postdoctoral researchers: $1,000
  • Travel to the 2018 CCA Conference in Regina and the 2018 conference of the Canadian chapter of the International Institute of Communications (IIC) in Ottawa
  • Publication of winning papers in both official languages on the CRTC website
  • Presentation of winning papers before CRTC Commissioners and other federal policy makers

 The complete terms and conditions of the Prize may be found in the attached document.

crtc-cca_prize_termsofreference_eng.pdf