Definition
Tax law is an area of legal study dealing with the constitutional, common-law, statutory, tax treaty, and regulatory rules that constitute the law applicable to taxation.
Tax Code
What is a ‘Tax Code’
A tax code is a federal government document, numbering tens of thousands of pages that details the rules individuals and businesses must follow, in remitting a percentage of their incomes to the federal government. The tax code is used as a source by tax lawyers whom bear the responsibility of interpreting it for the public.
Explaining ‘Tax Code’
A number of secondary sources, such as the numbered Internal Revenue Service publications, Treasury regulations, revenue rulings, and mass-market income-tax books, attempt to put the tax code into plain language for taxpayers. Taxpayers can often correctly comply with tax rules by following the guidelines laid out in these secondary publications, but for more complex situations, it may be necessary to consult the tax code directly, to decipher the tax laws.
Further Reading
- Debt and the marginal tax rate – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
- Regulating executive pay: Using the tax code to influence chief executive officer compensation – www.journals.uchicago.edu [PDF]
- WACC and a generalized tax code – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
- On the optimal progressivity of the income tax code – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
- Financing entrepreneurship through the tax code: Angel investor tax credits – www.nber.org [PDF]
- Contra coercion: Russian tax reform, exogenous shocks, and negotiated institutional change – www.jstor.org [PDF]
- A tax motivation for smoothing dividends – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
- How to Live with a Tax Code with Which You Disagree: Doctrine, Optimal Tax, Common Sense, and the Debt-Equity Distribution – heinonline.org [PDF]
- Corporate tax and capital structure: some evidence and implications – www.tandfonline.com [PDF]
