Disparate Tax Treatment of Different Types of Business Organizations: Where Should We Go From Here?

If several persons wish to join together in a common enterprise in order to pool their capital or labor or some of each, they may choose among a variety of available organizational structures that will serve that purpose. The most common entity forms are partnerships, corporations, and trusts. While, in its typical structure, each of those entity forms has its own distinct characteristics, the structure of such organizations often is modified by agreement so as to adopt attributes of another type of entity. Because of this, the substantive distinction between entity types is blurred.

However, tax law's treatment of these entities is dissimilar in many important respects.