Enlisting the Tax Bar
Abstract
Tax shelters and aggressive planning derive in part from a structural imbalance in our tax system that has not been adequately explored: In important respects, the private tax bar outmatches their counterparts in government. Although a strong policy case can be made for remedying this mismatch, this Article emphasizes two institutional barriers that complicate any solution, rooted in the political economy of taxation and the economics and professional norms of the legal profession. First, although it would be enormously helpful to dramatically increase the staffing levels and pay of government tax administrators, this is a politically daunting task. Second, a fallback strategy is to look to the private bar for help, but they face a significant conflict. Both market pressure and professional norms motivate them to serve their clients, who generally do not have an interest in improving government tax enforcement.
In light of these two challenges, what can be done to mitigate the mismatch between the government and private bar? This Article offers two sets of proposals. First, a number of suggestions focus on the government, offering ways to improve recruiting and reinforce the expertise at their disposal without dramatically increasing funding or raising pay substantially across the board. For example, the government should focus on recruiting senior lawyers out of retirement (whose financial demands will be limited) and having them mentor junior lawyers directly from law school (whose private sector pay is high, but not nearly as high as it will become in later years). The government should also consider a loan forgiveness program for these recent graduates, and should also enlist academics to assist with discrete projects. The government should also retain private law firms to litigate tax controversies with extraordinary precedential value.
Second, this Article offers guidance about the right way (and the wrong way) to tap the expertise and information possessed by the private bar. It is more effective, whenever possible, to ask lawyers to help the government in a way that also helps their clients. Using this principle, this Article identifies promising opportunities that have been overlooked, and critiques unpromising initiatives that have attracted significant government support. For example, clients do not want their own tax deals shut down, but they feel differently about their competitor's deals, so the government should make more systematic use of this opportunity. Likewise, although clients are less motivated to help the government identify bad transactions that are inadvertently permitted, they are highly motivated to identify good transactions that are inadvertently prohibited. As a result, the government can look to the private bar for help in narrowing overbroad anti-abuse measures. On the other hand, in asking tax advisors to disclose their clients' aggressive transactions – in effect, to "rat" on their clients – the government is asking for something that clearly is not in the clients' interest. This reality is likely to undercut this initiative, which has been one of the centerpieces of the government's efforts to date.