Corporate Tax Integration and TCJA: How Near the Mark?

Congress, by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (hereinafter “TCJA”),1 made a number of changes to the income tax rates applicable to individuals and profits of businesses conducted both in corporate and non-corporate form. Elsewhere, in an article entitled Advancing to Corporate Tax Integration: A Laissez-Faire Approach, I advanced the case for an Integrationist Norm of business income taxation.2 In the tax regime of the Integrationist Norm, all business profits would be subject to exactly the same tax burden as if a business were conducted directly by the individual equity holders without an intervening legal fiction of a juridical business entity. The purpose of this Article is to assess how near TCJA brings the Internal Revenue Code (hereinafter the “Code”) to achieving the Integrationist Norm, and to consider what possible modifications to TCJA might bring it nearer the target, and whether achieve sufficiently more good than harm to justify the effort to have them enacted.