Featured Articles

Selling One's Place in a Class: Part I: The Tax Issues

James Edward Maule
August 01, 2008 15:48

Thanks to Paul Caron's TaxProf Blog, I learned that students at NYU are buying and selling places in their law school courses. Though Paul refers to this practice as "cash for class," as do I in my comments, the ABA Journal article on the story notes that not only cash, but also gift certificates,...

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Reduced Legal Education Does Not Guarantee Better Preparation for Law Practice

James Edward Maule
March 21, 2012 12:01

The rapidly growing legal education crisis (which I explored seven years ago in The Future of Legal Education and Law Faculty Activities) has inspired lawyers, judges, law faculty, politicians, and clients to toss out all sorts of ideas for fixing the problems and making legal education relevant...

REPOST: Sorry I Wrote

James Edward Maule
March 19, 2012 17:52

[Reposted from January 2005 because it no longer appears in the monthly archive because of blogspot page length restrictions]Time to wander from tax into another area of interest (and one in which I also teach), that of wills and trusts. Specifically, time to explore the application of...

Tax Return Preparation Disaster

James Edward Maule
March 19, 2012 12:01

One of my readers alerted me to a story of which I had been unaware. It involves a tax return preparation enterprise that has created nightmares for its clients.The story involves a business called Mo’ Money Taxes, which is based in Memphis, Tennessee. The company is a lender and offers tax return...

The Futility of Tax Incentives

James Edward Maule
March 16, 2012 12:01

For many years reaching back to long before MauledAgain existed, and in many postings on that blog, I have rejected the use of tax law to accomplish indirectly what should be handled directly by government agencies other than the IRS and state revenue departments. In posts such as The Problem with...

Promising Progress on the K-12 Tax Education Front

James Edward Maule
March 14, 2012 12:01

Tax professionals, tax educators, school board members, high school principals and teachers, and taxpayers generally ought to set aside several minutes to view a heartening story about high school students learning to prepare, and preparing, income tax returns. The students participate in the...

When Tax Advice Is Frightening

James Edward Maule
March 12, 2012 12:01

The other day I heard a commercial on the local news radio station. A jewelry store chain was singing the praises of its business, and closed the advertisement by advising potential customers that if they went to the chain’s Delaware store, they could avoid Pennsylvania sales tax. This nugget of...

Refund-Based Tax Return Preparation Fees

James Edward Maule
March 09, 2012 13:01

A recent story about yet another public figure running into a tax problem caught my attention not so much because it involved false tax returns but because of the size of the tax return preparation fee. Even though that’s part of the entire swindle, I wonder why it did not raise anyone’s eyebrows...

When Tax Troubles Pile On

James Edward Maule
March 07, 2012 13:01

The recently issued opinion of the United States Tax Court in Martignon v. Comr., T.C. Summary Opinion 2012-18 (March 1, 2012) describes a taxpayer for whom the stars were not nicely aligned. The taxpayer went into business with an Alejandro Vargas when they opened a restaurant called Café...

Chocolate? Yes!

James Edward Maule
March 06, 2012 00:23

Here we go again! More proof that chocolate is medicinal. Check out this report, forwarded to me by my sister, about the flavonoid epicatechin that is found in dark chocolate. How long until a proposal for a chocolate purchasing tax credit shows up? I ask that with a grin.