Bankruptcy’s Corporate Tax Loophole

By Diane Lourdes Dick, Seattle University School of Law

My recent article, Bankruptcy’s Corporate Tax Loophole, 82 Fordham L. Rev. 2273 (2014), explains how corporate debtors use Chapter 11 to divert the value of tax losses and credits to a select group of stakeholders in contravention of bankruptcy’s distributional norms.

The problem stems from an ambiguity at the intersection of federal tax and bankruptcy law. Bankruptcy-specific exceptions in the tax laws transform a corporate debtor’s tax attributes into marketable property that, in many cases, gives the bankruptcy estate its intrinsic value. Yet bankruptcy law’s most vital safeguards neglect to fully take into account these tax assets, leaving them vulnerable to siphoning by dominant stakeholders who are in a position to extract excess returns.

Most notably, the debtor’s valuable tax attributes slip through the cracks of the “fair and equitable” test for contested Chapter 11 plans. The analysis requires, in pertinent part, that the court evaluate whether the plan provides each impaired and dissenting creditor with at least as much as it would have received in a hypothetical Chapter 7 liquidation. But testing a Chapter 11 plan against a hypothetical liquidation naturally omits the debtor’s tax attributes from consideration, as they would be extinguished when the liquidated debtor is subsequently dissolved. This means that the “fair and equitable” analysis ignores the very existence of what may be the debtor’s most valuable asset.

This extraordinary gap not only facilitates inequitable allocations of economic benefits and burdens in Chapter 11 but also causes a much broader, systematic misallocation of resources. I recommend statutory revisions to the federal tax and bankruptcy laws to neutralize the tax consequences of corporate restructuring decisions.

The full-length article can be found here and here.