The Many Faces of the Economic Substance\u27s Two-Prong Test: Time for Reconciliation?

The fall of 2004 saw the occurrence of several important developments in relation to the ongoing debate on the application of the economic substance doctrine. It started with the issuance of the opinion in Long Term Capital Holding v. United States in the end of August, a case in which a District Court held that a transaction involving the contribution of stock with a built-in loss to a partnership lacked economic substance and had been entered into without any business purpose other than tax avoidance. The court upheld penalties assessed by the IRS despite the taxpayer’s argument that it obtained and relied on two should level opinions supporting its position. During the fall, the Jobs Act of 2004 was finalized and finally signed by the president on October 22, 2004, leaving out the proposed codification of the economic substance doctrine. Subsequent to the Government’s victory in Long Term Capital Holding v. United States, three District Courts have held for the taxpayers in cases involving an economic substance analysis. First, in Black & Decker Corp. v. United States a U.S. District Court has granted Black & Decker Corp.\u27s motion for summary judgment in its refund suit for over $57 million in federal taxes arising from a contingent liability transaction, on the grounds that the transaction had economic substance. Second, in TIFD III-E Inc. v. United States a U.S. District Court (in the Second Circuit) has ordered the IRS to refund$ 62 million to TIFD, the tax matters partner of Castle Harbour-I LLC, applying the economic substance doctrine and finding that the LLC\u27s creation was not a sham designed solely to avoid taxes) Finally, in Coltec Industries Inc. v. United States a U.S. Court of Federal Claims has ordered the IRS to refund to Coltec Industries Inc. $ 82.8 million in federal taxes arising from a contingent liability transaction, almost similar to the one in Black & Decker, on the grounds that the transaction satisfied the statutory language and requirements and, only as a backstop, applying the economic substance doctrine to conclude that the transaction had both business purpose and economic substance. These events have emphasized the controversial application of the doctrine, and how divided are courts, the Government and taxpayers in their interpretation of the doctrine. In a previous article, this author has explored the profit potential issue, an ongoing debatable issue in relation to the doctrine. This article focuses on another unsettled issue, namely the application of the two-prong test. Frank Lyon v. United States has been construed to establish a two-prong standard for examining if a transaction lacks economic substance. Under the general two-prong test described in greater detail herein, the economic substance doctrine is based on an objective and subjective determination of whether a transaction has real, nontax economic benefit. Nevertheless, since Frank Lyon v. United States, the United States Supreme Court has not issued an important decision involving economic substance analysis, and interpretations of the doctrine subsequent to Frank Lyon v. United States was left to the circuits. As a result, circuits and courts are divided with respect to the application of the two-prong test, and several variations have emerged, each of which may result in a different way. This article presents the competing views regarding the application of the two prong test, and suggest a practical solution to reconcile these differences. The conclusions advanced are that the two-prong test ought to be collapsed into a single objective test, which would generally consist of the current objective prong

Some Concerns Regarding Ternary-relation Semantics and Truth-theoretic Semantics in General

This paper deals with a collection of concerns that, over a period of time, led the author away from the Routley–Meyer semantics, and towards proof- theoretic approaches to relevant logics, and indeed to the weak relevant logic MC of meaning containment

P is not equal to NP

SAT is not in P, is true and provable in a simply consistent extension B' of a first order theory B of computing, with a single finite axiom characterizing a universal Turing machine. Therefore, P is not equal to NP, is true and provable in a simply consistent extension B" of B.Comment: In the 2nd printing the proof, in the 1st printing, of theorem 1 is divided into three parts a new lemma 4, a new corollary 8, and the remaining part of the original proof. The 2nd printing contains some simplifications, more explanations, but no error has been correcte

Hyperformulae, Parallel Deductions and Intersection Types

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On the construction and algebraic semantics of relevance logic

Treballs Finals de Grau de Matemàtiques, Facultat de Matemàtiques, Universitat de Barcelona, Any: 2020, Director: Joan Gispert Brasó[en] The truth-functional interpretation of classical implication gives rise to relevance paradoxes, since it doesn't adequately model our usual understanding of a valid implication, which assumes the antecedent is relevant to the truth of the consequent. This work gives an overview of the system $\mathbf{R}$ of relevance logic, which aims to avoid said paradoxes. We present the logic $\mathbf{R}$ with a Hilbert calculus and then prove the Variable-sharing Theorem. We also give an equivalent algebraic semantics for $\mathbf{R}$ and a semantics for its first-degree entailment fragment

An explanation of or-deletions and other paradoxical disjunctive inferences

Some inferences of the sort: A or B; therefore A, which are invalid in standard logics, are sensible in life: You can enter now or later; therefore, you can enter now. That these "or-deletions" follow necessarily or only possibly is a by-product of a theory of mental models. Its semantics for "or" refers to conjunctions of possibilities holding in default of knowledge to the contrary. It predicts new sorts of or-deletion, such as: He likes to drink red wine or white wine. So, he likes to drink red wine. and: You are permitted to do only one of the following: You can enter now. You can enter later. Therefore, you are permitted to enter now. They are invalid in standard logics, and neither previous pragmatic nor semantic theories predicted them. Four experiments corroborated their occurrence.Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - FCTinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Algorithms for computational argumentation in artificial intelligence

Argumentation is a vital aspect of intelligent behaviour by humans. It provides the means for comparing information by analysing pros and cons when trying to make a decision. Formalising argumentation in computational environment has become a topic of increasing interest in artificial intelligence research over the last decade. Computational argumentation involves reasoning with uncertainty by making use of logic in order to formalize the presentation of arguments and counterarguments and deal with conflicting information. A common assumption for logic-based argumentation is that an argument is a pair where Φ is a consistent set which is minimal for entailing a claim α. Different logics provide different definitions for consistency and entailment and hence give different options for formalising arguments and counterarguments. The expressivity of classical propositional logic allows for complicated knowledge to be represented but its computational cost is an issue. This thesis is based on monological argumentation using classical propositional logic [12] and aims in developing algorithms that are viable despite the computational cost. The proposed solution adapts well established techniques for automated theorem proving, based on resolution and connection graphs. A connection graph is a graph where each node is a clause and each arc denotes there exist complementary disjuncts between nodes. A connection graph allows for a substantially reduced search space to be used when seeking all the arguments for a claim from a given knowledgebase. In addition, its structure provides information on how its nodes can be linked with each other by resolution, providing this way the basis for applying algorithms which search for arguments by traversing the graph. The correctness of this approach is supported by theoretical results, while experimental evaluation demonstrates the viability of the algorithms developed. In addition, an extension of the theoretical work for propositional logic to first-order logic is introduced

The generation of concurrent code for declarative languages

PhD ThesisThis thesis presents an approach to the implementation of declarative languages on a simple, general purpose concurrent architecture. The safe exploitation of the available concurrency is managed by relatively sophisticated code generation techniques to transform programs into an intermediate concurrent machine code. Compilation techniques are discussed for 1'-HYBRID, a strongly typed applicative language, and for 'c-HYBRID, a concurrent, nondeterministic logic language. An approach is presented for 1'- HYBRID whereby the style of programming influences the concurrency utilised when a program executes. Code transformation techniques are presented which generalise tail-recursion optimisation, allowing many recursive functions to be modelled by perpetual processes. A scheme is also presented to allow parallelism to be increased by the use of local declarations, and constrained by the use of special forms of identity function. In order to preserve determinism in the language, a novel fault handling mechanism is used, whereby exceptions generated at run-time are treated as a special class of values within the language. A description is given of ,C-HYBRID, a dialect of the nondeterministic logic language Concurrent Prolog. The language is embedded within the applicative language 1'-HYBRID, yielding a combined applicative and logic programming language. Various cross-calling techniques are described, including the use of applicative scoping rules to allow local logical assertions. A description is given of a polymorphic typechecking algorithm for logic programs, which allows different instances of clauses to unify objects of different types. The concept of a method is derived to allow unification Information to be passed as an implicit argument to clauses which require it. In addition, the typechecking algorithm permits higher-order objects such as functions to be passed within arguments to clauses. Using Concurrent Prolog's model of concurrency, techniques are described which permit compilation of 'c-HYBRID programs to abstract machine code derived from that used for the applicative language. The use of methods allows polymorphic logic programs to execute without the need for run-time type information in data structures.The Science and Engineering Research Council