Excerpt from Staff Data: Notes on Background of Existing Provisions of the Federal Income and Employment Tax Laws As brought out during the hearings in November and December 1959 before the Ways and Means Committee, there are numerous special provisions of current income and employment tax laws which either limit the amount of income subject to tax or provide special rules for the treatment of particular income or deduction items. The purpose of these notes is to set forth briefly, but as accurately as possible from the available records, the original purpose or intent of Congress when enacting provisions that now appear in the income and employment tax laws. In many cases it is not possible to determine precisely why an item is treated as it is. The committee reports covering the early income tax acts were by no means as detailed as those which have accompanied legislation in more recent years. Frequently, the debates on the floor of Congress also did not disclose why an individual provision was enacted or rejected. However, insofar as possible, these notes try to trace the original reasons for particular provisions that have survived until the present time. These notes are not intended to serve as a legislative history of the Federal income tax. No effort has been made to trace all the modifications in individual provisions throughout the years they have been effective. Likewise, complete precision in stating the application and limitations of current or past law has not been attempted. While use has been made of the standard legislative histories, textbooks of income tax law, and tax service compilations in preparing this summary, reference should be made to these sources if either a complete record or full detail about a certain tax provision is wanted. The aim of these notes is the modest one of quickly outlining the general objective of, and rationale for, features of the current statute. The material is arranged in the order in which it appears in the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 as amended to January 1, 1960.Most, but not all, of the substantive sections of Chapter 1 of the code (relating to income taxes) have been covered in these notes. Subchapters C(relating to corporate distributions and adjustments), J(relating to estates and trusts), and K(relating to partners and partnerships), have been omitted because legislation making extensive revisions in these subchapters is pending. Subchapter E(relating to accounting periods), L(relating to insurance companies), and Q(relating to readjustment of tax between years and special limitations) have been omitted either because of limited general interest in these provisions or because they have already received extensive reconsideration in recent years. In addition to Chapter 1 of Subtitle A of the code, the present summary also covers Subtitle C (employment taxes). About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.