BU Law’s Graduate Tax Program Promotes Student Scholarship
The program fosters contributions to the industry through its new seminar: Current Developments and Issues in Taxation.
“To be competitive in the tax LLM global marketplace we need to actively contribute to the tax culture,” says Richard Ainsworth, director of Boston University School of Law’s Graduate Tax Program (GTP). Taking his guidance to heart, Harsh Arora (LLM’16), a student enrolled in the GTP’s online option, has had two articles published in Tax Notes since beginning his LLM in Taxation. These papers were based on topics in international taxation he learned through his GTP courses.
Tax Notes International published his paper entitled “Understanding Australia’s ‘Netflix Tax’ ” in December 2015. It highlighted the Australian proposal, which compares the approach with the EU Value Added Tax (VAT) and the US retail sales tax.
His second paper, entitled “Fair and Flat Taxes Compared With A Progressive Consumption Tax,” compares the two VAT proposals introduced by Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Maryland) and leans in favor of Cardin’s progressive consumption tax proposal.
Arora is an international business attorney at Spiegel & Utrera, based in the firm’s Miami and New York City offices. His practice focuses on tax matters, cross-border transactions, and domestic business litigation.
“I selected the online distance learning option of BU Law’s GTP for the high level of flexibility and quality it affords,” says Arora, who wanted to strengthen his existing tax practice. “I manage business attorneys and legal support staff in the firm’s domestic business litigation department and my work gets too busy for me to take full-time residential classes. The GTP’s flexible structure enables experienced attorneys like me to pursue our careers while we get the benefit of an advanced degree.”
Inspiring scholarship
The GTP’s course structure offers students, many of whom are practicing lawyers, the opportunity to research a range of real-life issues within the field of domestic and international taxation, and encourages them to dissect complex issues and produce original scholarship of publishable quality.
“I took a course around VAT and other consumption taxes during the summer of 2015 with Director Ainsworth and greatly enjoyed the seminar,” says Arora. “The two papers I wrote as part of my course work formed the basis of my research and Director Ainsworth’s guidance and support were instrumental in helping get my papers published in renowned publications.”
Ainsworth’s teaching experience and scholarly interests in comparative transfer pricing, comparative VAT, and comparative income tax have inspired his students to pursue scholarship even outside of their course work. “At an LLM level, students should be actively participating in the tax dialogue,” he says.“Employers seek people who are engaged, not merely competent. In the digital age, a lot of tax-related lawyering can be done using software by people with some law background—paralegals, accountants, etc. Tax lawyers need to be a notch above by being actively involved in the development of tax law.”
“Although consumption taxes such as VAT exist in other countries, the US is yet to get aligned with these different tax systems that are popular in other parts of the world,” says Arora. “This is an important aspect of global economies. With an increase in cross-border transactions, foreign tax systems in other parts of the world impact the planning and operations of US-based businesses as they venture into global markets.”
“While these topics highlight the contours of domestic and international taxation, current research in the field is quite limited,” says Arora. “Lawyers and students can add to the body of scholarship by reviewing existing perspectives and building on it through additional research.”
New courses and seminars
This spring, the GTP added a new seminar entitled Current Developments and Issues in Taxation, which offers students the opportunity to conduct in-depth research and improve their writing skills on current issues in taxation.
Ainsworth describes the new course format as “fluid and accommodative of students’ varied interests,” allowing them to choose a current topic and write on it for publication if they so wish. “Very few of the topics of interest are linear,” he says. “The best topics are comparative. For example, students would compare a rule in the US with one in Japan.”
The first students to take the new course examined diverse topics across global policies in taxation, working on a range of papers covering topics like new US regulations on corporate inversions, comparative treatment of “location savings” in US, OECD, German, Chinese and Indian rules, to VAT in the Gulf Community Council (GCC) to name a few.
“At BU Law, the faculty and students collaborate and create original thought leadership in order to shape the taxation industry,” says Ainsworth.“Many of the papers penned by our students show promise. Some are in the pipeline for publication in global platforms, even bi-lingual ones. They stand to make a substantive difference to the field of global taxation.”
Reported by Indira Priyadarshini (COM’16).