Chodorow presents at a tax policy workshop in Boston


Professor Adam Chodorow presented his article entitled, “Doing Good While Staying Well: A Proposal to Combine Healthcare and Charitable Giving,” as part of Boston College’s Tax Policy Workshop on Wednesday, Feb. 16.

The article focuses on healthcare flexible spending accounts that allow taxpayers to set income aside tax free to use for medical expenses, but the money falls under a “use-it-or-lose it” feature where it does not rollover and must be used by a certain date. The article explores ways to allow taxpayers to donate unused healthcare flex spending accounts to charity.

From the article’s abstract, “In this article, I propose combining the two provisions by allowing taxpayers to donate unused healthcare FSAs amounts to charity. Doing so would lower a key impediment to participation in healthcare FSAs while giving a functional above-the-line deduction (and relief from payroll taxes) to those who donate through this mechanism. To accomplish this, Congress should recast healthcare FSAs as tax-favored savings accounts, as opposed to the quasi-insurance instruments they currently purport to be, conforming the accounts to the way most people think about and use them. Not only would this reform increase the efficacy of both provisions, but it should also avoid many of the pitfalls of prior reform efforts.”

To read the entire article, click here.

Chodorow’s research and teaching interests lie in tax, administrative and regulatory law. He teaches a variety of tax courses, as well as Law and the Regulatory State. His research focuses on religious taxation and a variety of contemporary tax issues, such as the taxability of virtual income. Chodorow is Vice Chair for Planning for the Teaching Tax Committee of the ABA’s Tax Section and on the Council of the Tax Section of the State Bar of Arizona.

Staci McCabe, Staci.McCabe@asu.edu
(480) 965-8702
Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law