Taxation Law Books

It's not like anyone who's not in Law school would ever buy this book. I think that the cases are well edited to cut out the stuff that's just not relevant to the legal principal gained from each. However, if you're not in law school briefing cases to please a professor, just go to a law library and read the cases. Or, hire me in three years and I'll do it for you.
Happy Reading,
Adam

Books of this nature help to capture the regulatory flavor of an era. These four authors are to be commended for describing the climate of the FCC as television and radio were dominant forces of mass communication in the days before the internet. The marketplace was much more limited at the time and the era of deregulation was not in full blown force. In fact, the Commission took its watchdog role seriously in seeking to do what was in the best interest of the American people, not the players with the largest amount of dollars in the marketplace. In spite of all this, the agency misregulated the medium. The stage was set for the process to evolve as it has in subsequent decades. The authors contend "governmental policies virtually precluded entry by additional networks." While the Commission's policy statement would mention one item such as diversity, there was no actual way it could be measured. A considerable discussion focuses on the network/affiliate relationship. This book helps to show the evolution of what became the "marketplace model" of regulation of the FCC of the early 21st century.

This is an ambitious work which investigates how ideas which justify particular interests are adopted into law and influence intellectual presumptions. Bowman wants to know how we got to the point where "increasingly, transnational corporate power, not state power, constitutes the formative agent of change in world development."

He begins by reviewing how the republican tradition, which emphasized the responsibilities of citizen and statesman in maintaining social balance, was gradually replaced by the rise of classic liberalism, which affirmed the rights of the individual and justified the rise of capitalism by conceiving of economics as a matter of contracts between individuals. Economic activity came to represent the realm of freedom and the pursuit of self-interest. The coercive powers of the state were limited to preserving the realm of freedom and social efficiency. The ideological precept of corporate autonomy grew out of legal doctrines which reified the corporation as a citizen, thus, serving both to legitimize and to disguise corporate power as an inviolable part of the natural order. Corporate liberalism rose as an alternative to laissez-faire liberalism and statist socialism.

Jurists moved from thinking of the corporation as an artificial construct of the sovereign to a regulated citizen. The rights of due process aided corporate power by providing constitutional rights that could be invoked against state attempts to regulate. With the rights of legal persons, came an expectation of corporate social responsibility, consistent with the ideological concept of citizenship. The western frontier and the "invisible hand" gave way to faith in technological advance and a pragmatic role for government support and regulation.

Bowman's historical journey leads through exponents of the Progressive Movement such as Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Thorstan Veblin who argued that corporate hegemony constituted the central problem of modern society. In place of the automatic balance of the marketplace, a conscious social balance would have to be imposed. The rights of property would be reduced but freedom would be retained through the separation of political and economic realms. Our concept of democracy shifted from the belief that sovereignty resides in the people to a more instrumental approach, dependent on rule by experts and faith in technology.

At the beginning of the Progressive Movement most large corporations were controlled by the majority stockholder. With the publication of Berle and Means' The Modern Corporation and Private Property in 1932 that assumption changed and the economic/political dichotomy fell. Peter F. Drucker, Adolph A. Berle and John Kenneth Galbraith "viewed the corporation as an autonomous or self-sufficient entity capable of generating its own capital and therefore no longer dependent on the capital markets." The objective of managerial theory shifted from preserving democratic institutions by regulating enterprise, to limiting the regulatory powers of government in deference to the value of corporate autonomy.

Each wave of populism was marked by pushing regulation of corporations to a more abstract level. Bowman speculates on the future of the adoption of an international companies act or a supranational corporate charter. Behind the political decisions of corporations, Bowman sees the work of a dominant class. His is not the simple class warfare of Marx; the owners of the means of production pitted against the masses. Instead, for Bowman, control lies with the corporate executives and board members of the top 200 industrial and 50 financial corporations. Power based on relationships of control over the corporate bureaucracy superseded power based on property ownership, as the corporation developed into a political institution.

So where does Bowman look for salvation from a world dominated by a few hundred corporate executives? Clearly, he believes that large corporations must be held accountable for policies that affect society and that increasingly, corporate accountability will be defined in global terms. He rejects any movement to destroy the corporate form or rewrite their charters after the fashion of the 19th century. Instead, he seems to turn to public interest groups organized around environmental, health and consumer issues. According to Bowman, America's tradition of civic activism has "found its most potent voice when it has arrayed itself against corporate power or class privilege." Yet, even here Bowman appears pessimistic since he believes corporate social responsibility is unlikely to become a salient political issue except in cases of gross negligence or blatant disregard for the public welfare. In addition, through the media and political influence, corporations have taken the lead in redefining the parameters of corporate social responsibility.

However, the reforms public interest groups seek are dependent on government regulation. If, as Bowman argues, corporations are so dominant they control government, it seems that little would change. Perhaps Bowman is too quick to dismiss those who seek to reform the corporations themselves. He sees the dominant struggles for control in merger battles not in a resurgence of stockholder democracy. "Tender offers, an essential strategy of the merger movement, have supplanted proxy fights as the favored means of seizing control of large corporations."

While tender offers and diversified mergers have played a significant role in increasing asset concentration, there has also been a significant resurgence of shareholder democracy. As more money moves to the indexes and to institutional investors with large holdings, shareholder democracy becomes increasingly important; shareholders who cannot sell must become active in corporate governance if they wish to increase the value of their holdings. In 1992 the Securities and Exchange Commission changed the rules regarding shareholder communication. After this limited deregulation, the United Shareholders Association estimated the cost of a target mailing to a corporation's 1,000 largest shareholders was reduced from $1M to between $5,000 and $10,000.

Bowman does an excellent job of drawing from concepts in law, political thought and the social sciences in making a case for a revised form of class analysis to explain the character and evolution of corporate power. He is clearly right that civic activism reaches its peak when it focuses on "corporate power or class privilege." Each wave of reform in the past has been immediately preceded by public outrage. Upton Sinclair's portrait of the meatpacking industry, Ida Tarbell's condemnation of Standard Oil, Rachel Carson's cry for the environment and Ralph Nader's research into unsafe cars each stirred the middle class to action. Each crisis is answered with a new set of regulations for business.

Perhaps if shareholder democracy can take root, corporations will build democratic mechanisms into their own structures. Power would then shift from the dominant class of Bowman's concern to a more broadly based group of shareholders and employees. Arguably, such a shift would be consistent with both republican and liberal democratic traditions. Social balance would be restored, while preserving the realm of freedom and social efficiency, by relying less on the coercive powers of the state.

http://www.corpgov.net

I am interested in the issue of monpsony and I was surprised to see that there aren't so many of them. After looking ans searching I traced this book and found out that it summerizes the issue very good and gives you a basic information on the subject. the problem is that things have rapidly changed in last 8 years and the book must be updated.

This book is very concise and takes the guess work out of hiring in home help. Due to the nature of state laws, it is unable to give specific info regarding the state you live in, but given that limitation, it does a good job at explaining everything else you need to consider when hiring someone in your home. I would recommend this book as a good place to start if you're thinking about hiring domestic help!

Employers and managers today face an increasing number of threats to the organization. Theft of business assets costs U.S. companies an estimated $40 billion a year. More than one million employees a year are victims of workplace violence. Employees who download games from the internet increase the risk of introducing viruses to company computer systems and expose their employers to charges of software piracy. However, measures that employer's have taken to address these issues, like workplace surveillance and performance monitoring, have sparked a violent debate, and several lawsuits claiming invasion of privacy, sexual harassment and discrimination. Your best defense, says William S. Hubbartt, is to be prepared. He presents guidelines for helping you to avoid battles over workplace privacy and examines some of the laws that protect employees' rights.

· Develop policies that will stand up in court. The best way to avoid lawsuits is to clearly spell out the policies that the company will use to handle privacy issues like testing, conduct and performance monitoring. Before you draft your policies, make sure you are aware of federal and state laws that apply.
· When screening job applicants, relate all questions and checks to the job.
· Protect computerized records containing information about employees.
· Develop tests that fairly evaluate employee's work attributes.
· If you use drug testing, notify applicants and employees that they will be tested. Utilize procedures that allow them as much privacy and dignity as possible.
· Have a clear business justification for formal dress codes, such as public image, security or safety. Apply dress codes equally to men and women. Communicate the purpose of the dress code to employees.
· Banning solicitation at the workplace must apply to everyone, from girl scout cookies to distributing religious literature.
· Respect your employees lifestyle choices.
· Investigate if the problem is serious.
· Use monitoring to check routine issues.

Written in a breezy, easy-to-understand style, this book is a must for anyone--actor or otherwise--who works in the performing arts field. The author understands the unique nature of their jobs and how it relates to taxes, deductions, etc. It will save you money in the long run. The only problem I have is that it only comes out every two years.

One of the more daunting challenges for US nonprofit board members, officers, and senior staff is setting compensation and benefits for existing and prospective employees. They are faced with the challenges of navigating not only the "usual" employment-related laws that all employers face, but also those laws peculiar to the nonprofit sector.

There is also the related challenge of setting compensation levels and benefits high enough to compete for the most talented candidates, but not so high as to run afoul of the intermediate sanctions rules.

Unfortunately, there is no single book that I've found that combines both the legal and practical elements involved in such important decisions. However, I have found two books that, taken together, substantially cover the territory: Nonprofit Compensation, Benefits, and Employment Law, covering the legal aspects, and Nonprofit Compensation and Benefits Practices, covering compensation levels.

This review covers Nonprofit Compensation, Benefits, and Employment Law, a reference that focuses mostly on the legal aspects of employee compensation and benefits. It not only covers those laws unique to the nonprofit sector, but, thankfully, addresses workplace-related statutes of broader applicability such as workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and so on. It even covers 401(k) plans, which until recently were unavailable to nonprofit organizations.

Importantly, the book offers a solid treatment of the intermediate sanctions law -- a topic that is critical for these reasons:

--Board members, officers and other "managers" can be individually "fined" a 10% excise tax for participating in an excess benefit transaction. Voting on a compensation package that exceeds reasonable levels of compensation could give rise to such penalties.

--The employee who is over-compensated can be hit with 25% or, in some cases, 200% penalties.

While the book is comprehensive and well written, I would like to have seen model or sample employment agreements to help in drafting. Had it provided these samples, I would have given this a 5-star rating.

This book comes with a hefty price - I was hesitant. If you are considering the establishment of your own private foundation, this book is a must. It is fairly heavy with the legaleze, but required when considering the thorough discussions of establishing and maintaining a foundation with respect to the applicable IRS tax code. Each topic is documented and sample tax forms are illustrated. Highly recommended - needs to be a little more user friendly for the 5th star.

This book provides many practice problems for a Federal Income Tax class. The explanations are concise and very helpful in understanding the material. I found this book to be invaluable in studying Federal Income Tax and highly recommend it. I used this along with Examples and Explanations and found this book to more helpful than Examples and Explanations.