Understanding Federal Income Taxation consists of forty-four chapters with each chapter addressing a basic topic in individual income taxation, e.g., the taxation of personal injury awards, the interest deduction, installment sales. Because the provisions of the Internal Revenue Code are necessarily at the heart of tax study, a part or all of the Code section(s) pertinent to the specific topic are included in each chapter. Likewise, the chapters contain summaries of leading cases and relevant administrative rulings as well as numerous examples explaining the application of the law. Like the prior edition published in 2008, this new Fourth Edition of Understanding Federal Income Taxation is a valuable resource for students studying the tax law for the first time and for general practitioners handling transactions with individual income tax concerns. The Fourth Edition incorporates recent developments in the Internal Revenue Code, including new and amended provisions enacted as part of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. In addition, this new edition addresses important recent income tax cases as well as revised regulations and other new administrative materials. Many of these tax law changes are illustrated in new and revised examples included in the Fourth Edition.

Taxation is a discipline that does not receive sufficient academic attention. It is typically viewed as a subset of law, accounting, public policy, economics, or finance. In this respect, most academic efforts in the field of taxation are shadowed by a mother discipline. There is currently an unprecedented need to approach tax pedagogy in a way that is independent of another discipline. This book caters to that real and unmet need in tax pedagogy. One of the book’s advantages is that it is not tied to a specific tax year and does not coddle the reader with volumes of time-sensitive information. In this book the tax year is never the focus, as the center stage is reserved for teaching the principles and skills necessary to independently find answers. The reader will learn to appreciate the complexity of the American tax system and will be endowed with the contextual understanding necessary to formulate educated opinions about how taxes work and, most importantly, why. Contrary to common belief, taxation in the United States has remained fairly stable for the last 100 years. This book uses the federal individual income tax as a vehicle to unveil the mechanics that make up the American tax system. This book is essential reading for students taking a first course in taxation, at the undergraduate or graduate level, as part of programs in accounting, law, public administration, or business at large.