Naveen Jindal Professor Selected for Outstanding Paper Award
A professor from the Naveen Jindal School of Management has recently been selected as the winner of the Outstanding Paper Award from the American Taxation Association.
Accounting assistant professor John Gamino, specializing in issues of taxation, used his paper to look into the expanding industry of third-party litigation funding. His article, “Taxing Nonrecourse Litigation Funding”, appeared in the December 2014 issue of the Journal of Legal Tax Research. Selected based on its “relevance, contribution and value”, Gamino’s work earned the highest number of votes both for best and second-best article.
The American Taxation Association is a special interest group connected to the American Accounting Association, an organization for accountants involved in academia.
Gamino’s work covered litigation funding, which refers to the fronting of money to plaintiffs involved in civil lawsuits, and the ultimate sharing of any resulting settlement from the suit. The “nonrecourse” litigation funding mentioned in the article’s title refers to a company’s lack of recourse when advancing this money to plaintiffs- essentially, the companies do not benefit if no cash settlement is reached.
In his article, Gamino writes: “Largely unregulated, litigation funding began with the consumer market — that is, with personal injury actions and other relatively small-dollar cases involving individual plaintiffs. Over the last decade, however, the commercial market has expanded significantly, with funding transactions finding a place in high-stakes business litigation, including patent infringement, breach of contract, shareholder derivative suits, and more.”
Writing from the perspective of a tax specialist, Gamino claims in his article that concerns over litigation funding regard taxation: the IRS has not officially acknowledged this process of third-party advances, and have no recourse for managing any issues of taxation that could arise as a result.
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Alanna Shaffer
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