Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2022
ISSN
0042-1448
Publisher
University of Utah College of Law
Language
en-US
Abstract
The tax law's race-blind approach produces bad tax policy.' This Essay uses three very different examples to show how failing to openly and honestly address race generates bias, and how devastating the results can be.2 Ignoring race does not solve problems; it creates them. ProPublica has shown, for example, that because of the perils of filing income taxes while Black, the five most heavily audited counties in the United States are Black and poor.
The racial bias long tolerated-and sometimes exploited-by tax scholars and policymakers affects all aspects of the tax law. In 1986, Sam Gilliam was denied tax deductions that others in similar situations enjoyed. 4 In 2000, Liberia was threatened with sanctions for being a tax haven, but Switzerland was not.5 In 2014, Eric Garner died in police custody after being suspected of evading a tax.6 In each instance, anti-Blackness played a role in ways the tax law either ignores or actively leverages. Because a succession of Democratic and Republican administrations-including the Biden administration after a full year in office-has declined to embrace comprehensive data on race, the tax law equivalent of body cameras, we must rely on stories to understand the impacts of filing while Black. The role of tax law in Black lives-and on Black deaths-demands our attention. Yet even today, the most powerful voices in tax policy, for example Treasury Secretaries, 7 continue to disregard the lessons countless Gilliams, Liberias, and Garners have suffered or died to teach us.
Part II highlights the tendency of even the most inquisitive tax minds to disregard the potential impact of race on interactions between taxpayers and tax authorities. A Black artist-long treated unequally by dealers, curators, and critics faced first the pain of being denied a deduction for business expenses readily granted to others, only to then suffer the further indignity of having that denial offered to generations of law students as comedy rather than tragedy. Part III offers a fleeting glimpse of a world in which a Black perspective shapes the course of global tax policymaking, with the Congressional Black Caucus handing a significant setback to efforts by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ("OECD") to punish poor Black countries as tax havens while ignoring the misdeeds of whiter, wealthier states. Finally, Part IV urges tax experts to ask uncomfortable questions about the role tax policy played in the death of Eric Garner while in the custody of NYC police officers, and how that death should change the design and enforcement of tax laws.
Recommended Citation
Steven Dean,
Filing While Black: The Casual Racism of the Tax Law
,
in
2022
Utah Law Review
801
(2022).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3391
