Proskauer’s 19th Annual Trick or Treat Seminar was held on Friday, October 31.

The Seminar discussed:

  • Charitable giving techniques
  • Labor and employment issues with using volunteers and interns
  • Recent developments in employee benefits

In her introductory remarks, Amanda Nussbaum discussed recent tax developments, including the development of IRS Form 1023-EZ, the process for reinstatement of tax-exempt status, and the proposed regulations under Section 501(c)(4), and introduced the presenters.

As part of a series of papers outlining tax reform options for the Senate Finance Committee (SFC), the SFC staff recently published a paper on tax reform options for tax-exempt organizations and charitable giving.  Like the other staff papers on tax reform options, the exempt organizations paper compiles suggestions that have been made by witnesses at SFC hearings, by policy experts, by bipartisan commissions, and elsewhere.  Thus, the paper does not set forth new proposals, but gathers in one place numerous proposals that have been made, with links to sources of those proposals where available.  For exempt organizations, the proposals range from taxing all commercial activities of tax-exempt organizations, to revising the unrelated business income tax rules for organizations conducting commercial activities, to requiring specified payout levels from endowments, to limiting executive compensation that tax-exempt organizations may pay.  With respect to the tax deduction for charitable contributions, the proposals range from repealing the deduction, to fundamentally changing the deduction, to incrementally reforming the deduction in a variety of ways.