Prof. Borden's New Tax Planning Book

The Brooklyn Law School Library has added to its collection BLS Professor Bradley T. Borden’s new book, Taxation and Business Planning for Real Estate Transactions (Call #KF6760 .B67 2011). A new addition to the LexisNexis Graduate Tax Series, a series of course materials designed for use in tax LL.M. programs, the book is designed for graduate tax faculty and students in and emphasizes complex, practice-oriented problems to develop the skills of careful analysis of the Internal Revenue Code and regulations. It is divided into 18 chapters, the first five of which are background chapters. Chapter 1 introduces the fact pattern and encourages students to spend time thinking about it and the work that a successful tax plan will require. Chapters 2 and 3 provide overviews of state-law entities (general partnerships, limited partnerships, limited liability companies, and corporations) and tax entities to consideer when planning for real estate transaction. Chapters 6 through 18 focus on tax planning in earnest (e.g., depreciation deductions, and rules governing gain and loss computation). They focus on ownership and transactional structures that best serve the interest of real estate investors. The book has four main objectives: (1) teaching tax planning skills; (2) helping students understand responsible tax planning that complies with standards of tax practice and professional ethics, (3) showing students who enter into government service be better prepared to draft rules that accomplish the government’s objectives, and (4) studying rules in a practice setting to reinforce how they apply in a broader context.

The abstract for the book reads in part:

This book focuses on tax planning in the real estate context. To adequately provide tax-planning advice, attorneys must be familiar with the transactional tax attorney’s analytical process. Transactional tax attorneys must recognize opportunities for tax planning and address issues that such planning may raise. Recognizing opportunities and addressing issues generally require a thorough understanding of the transaction and the relevant law. Such knowledge often derives from legal research and an in-depth study of primary-source legal resources, such as statutes, cases, regulations, and rulings. Legal research generally begins with treatises or articles that address the questions relevant to the tax-planning opportunity. That initial research leads the attorney to primary-source legal resources. The attorney then must interpret the law and apply it to a set of facts and provide advice.

To replicate the research process, each chapter of the book provides commentary that could be similar to . . . material typically found in a treatise, article, or other secondary source of legal authority. The commentary introduces ideas and legal concepts that apply to the questions and directs the reader to relevant primary legal authority. Ultimately, the students must carefully study, interpret, and apply relevant law to the issues raised by the questions. The commentary cites legal sources in the footnotes. The chapters reproduce relevant case law and rulings, but students will have to access the cited tax statutes and regulations in sources outside this book. The knowledge students will need to properly approach the material is largely contained in the law. In fact, students generally will not be able to fully understand and answer the questions until they have carefully studied the relevant law.