Income Taxes: Concise History and Primer.

• Author: Williams, Jr., David O.

By Robert M. Willan Claitor's Publishing Division, 1994)

There is much talk today of the need and political impetus for fundamental tax reform. The Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee has proclaimed the need to "tear the system out by the roots," and a plethora of tax proposals compete for the public's affection. What direction the debate will take -- what shape the system will ultimately assume -- remains unclear. Before rushing headlong to change the current system, however, tax executives, practitioners, and policy makers would be well advised to study the Internal Revenue Code and to understand why it looks the way it does. They might discover, as Pogo did, that the enemy of a fair, coherent, and easily understood tax law is not necessarily the Congress or the "faceless bureaucracy" but ourselves; they might discover that the tax system merely reflects the competing demands we place upon it.

A good place to start on the road to discovery is with the book here under review. With more than 45 years of experience with our federal tax system, Robert M. Willan is uniquely qualified to write Income Taxes: Concise History and Primer. Mr. Willan is a nationally known lawyer and has extensive background in tax legislation and tax policy issues. He has worked as a private practitioner, a corporate tax counsel, a trial attorney with the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department, a member of the tax staff of the U.S. Treasury Department, and Chief Tax Counsel of the Senate Finance Committee.

The book is truly an informative, educational, and helpful commentary on the federal income tax system. This 311-page history has eleven chapters, with a well-organized text containing numerous subheadings making it very "reader friendly." Footnotes are avoided by setting forth excerpts from committee reports, the Congressional Record, court cases, and other authorities in an appendix. Other appendices contain valuable information including an overview of tax history by topics for the period 1913-1993, a chronological index of tax rules, and a glossary of selected tax related terminology.

The book begins with separate forwards by Russell Long and Wilbur Mills, respectively, former Chairmen of the Senate Finance and House Ways and Means Committee. It then proceeds to discuss the tax law before the 1913 adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment and, amazingly, to summarize and comment on the most significant income tax acts from the initial 1913...