In case you have not read a newspaper, surfed the internet, or been outside your home recently, there is an obesity epidemic in the United States.[1] Search Google News for “’obesity epidemic’” and one will find about seven hundred stories in the last month.[2] Not to dwell on the prevalence of obesity, but according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in 2005-2006 “more than one-third of adults, or seventy-two million people [in the United States] were obese;” a number which had “doubled among adults from 1980 to 2004” and which has not decreased since.[3] [More]

I. Introduction.

It is well known that the big movement of capital in the next decade is going to be to Eastern Asia, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and India being the two most preferred targets due to the size of their consumer martkets. This article will only focus on the PRC. As it will be further explained, although foreign capitals may be invested in the PRC directly, from a taxation view point it is recommendable to do so through a Hong Kong, SAR entity. Thus, the Hong Kong tax system is lower and simpler than the Chinese mainland's one, therefore, could be more beneficial for foreign investors. Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the PRC on July 1, 1997. It has a high degree of autonomy, except in the areas of defense and foreign policy, and retains its own currency, laws, and border controls. [More]

A key battle over America’s healthcare future is being fought in one of the most unlikeliest of places: Urbana, Illinois. Scheduled for argument in front of the Illinois Supreme Court in mid-2009, Provena Covenant Medical Center v. Department of Revenue is poised to set the bar regarding the tax exempt status of nonprofit hospitals.[1] Nonprofit hospitals, such as Provena, account for near sixty percent of the hospitals in the U.S., while the others are either for-profit or government-owned.[2] Oddly, these nonprofit hospitals are actually faring better than their for-profit counterparts. Seventy-seven percent of the 2033 U.S. nonprofit hospitals are “in the black”, while sixty-one percent of for-profit hospitals are profitable.[3] One of the reasons for such high success rates is the ability of non-profit hospitals to receive significant tax exemptions. The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2006 that nonprofit hospitals receive an estimated $12.6 billion in annual tax exemptions on top of the $32 billion in federal, state and local subsidies the hospital industry receives each year.[4] Given such figures, it is not surprising that many hospitals do not make up for the exemptions they receive with the charitable services they provide. This article delves into the federal income tax code applications for nonprofit hospitals and resulting litigation.

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To a certain extent, most everyone becomes a tax protestor of sorts come tax season. The goal in filling out one's tax return is to ensure that one receives every penny back that can possibly be justified -- not that one pays the appropriate amount of tax given one's circumstances. And yet, most of us do indeed pay. Among those that do not pay in full can be found at least two distinct categories of shirkers: the tax evader, and the tax protestor. The tax evader is content to freeride off of the compliance of the rest of society, choosing not to pay taxes but not without tacit reliance on a system that requires taxation. The tax protestor, on the other hand, eschews taxation as a matter of course, proclaiming his distaste for this or any system of taxation by not taking part therein. While the net effect for both the tax evader and the tax protester is the non-or-under-payment of tax, the tax protester feels doctrinally empowered where the tax evader just feels wily. This article is concerned with the tax protester, and will examine first three broad categories into which arguments for the non-payment of the federal income tax fall, and then it will discuss a few different methods through which the tax protester achieves his ends. [More]

Tax exempt organizations, by design, do not have to answer to shareholders. The executives of these organizations do not feel the same pressures as do executives of taxable, for-profit organizations to run the entities in the most streamlined shareholder-interest-maximizing manner. Instead, the taxpaying public (who arguably subsidizes the activities of the tax-exempt sector) relies on detailed government regulation, the vast majority of which is found in the Internal Revenue Code, to ensure that the tax exempt arena neither becomes a black hole for this country's resources nor a playground for the very wealthy. As part of this monitoring charge, the IRS recently completed a three-year investigation into the compensation of executives of tax-exempt corporations.[1] This article discusses the objectives and methodology of this investigation, its findings and its minimal impact. [More]