Search

The issue of whether workers are independent contractors or employees has become even more relevant with recently enacted and proposed legislation and court cases in many jurisdictions seeking to impose employee status on many Gig economy workforce participants, such as ride-share drivers. This article emphasizes that the U.S. income tax rules, especially after tax reform effective in 2018, makes employee status extremely tax-inefficient for these workers. This article explains the relevant tax law changes and provides various examples of typical settings to confirm that workers with even small relative work expenses are often better off as contractors from a tax point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In pursuit of creating the tool for policy analysis accounting for existence of Ukrainian shadow economy, the shadow untaxed labor market is integrated into the aggregated static Computable General Equilibrium model. The developed model is successfully calibrated to official statistical data and proven suitable for further analysis. The efficiency of the 2016 social security tax reform is assessed and proven to be more dependent on the preferences between the formal and informal labor of the factor owner than on the magnitude of the tax cut. The importance of the preferences of both the manufacturer and the consumer, being represented as the elasticities of transformation and substitution between the formal and the informal labor in the model, is discovered. Based on treating these elasticities as instrumental variables, policy recommendations are developed.

Copyright of Cadernos de Finanças Públicas is the property of Escola de Administracao Fazendaria and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In a regressive tax system, lower-income taxpayers pay larger percentages of their incomes in taxes compared to higher-income taxpayers. Although most policymakers and citizens view regressive taxation as generally unfair and unethical, the U.S. tax system taxes wage, salary, and self-employment income in a manner that deliberately subjects lower-income taxpayers to marginal tax rates that are greater than those imposed on higher-income taxpayers. As a result, some lower-income taxpayers pay a larger percentage of their income in taxes than higher-income taxpayers. In this essay, we argue that this regressiveness in the taxation of salaried income is unfair and unethical. We then evaluate President Obama’s social security plan, which would retain most of the current tax system’s regressive structure. Finally, we offer two simple alternative proposals that are non-regressive, and thus more fair and ethical approaches to the taxation of salaried income. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]