Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Tax controversy

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus. —Darkwind (talk) 07:13, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Tax controversy

Tax controversy (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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Basically a dict term. Tax controversy is not a legal definition or otherwise common term, it's just two words put together. Hard for this to ever get past being a personal essay/OR Caffeyw (talk) 08:17, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. Northamerica1000^(talk) 09:14, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Law-related deletion discussions. Northamerica1000^(talk) 09:14, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Delete (possible redirect if someone can find a good target) as WP:DICDEF. Ansh666 09:45, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• possibly merge to United States Tax Court Googling shows that the term is used at least in advertizing and academic discussion but as a term in itself I can't imagine how there is much more to say beyond the present definition. Seyasirt (talk) 11:40, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• In future, the nominator needs to search Google Books before nominating an article for deletion. This nomination is preposterous. There are a substantial number of entire books devoted to this subject. Their titles refer to, amongst other things, practice and procedure which is not going to be a dictionary definition. There is no case for deletion and it may be possible to expand this article. James500 (talk) 18:14, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • No book I see on Google Books will be able to save this article: either it doesn't expand beyond WP:DICDEF or it falls afoul of WP:NOTGUIDE once expanded. Take your pick. Ansh666 18:30, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • It is possible to discuss litigation as a subject without giving instructions or advice. It is not obvious to me, without reading them cover to cover, that these books are completely unsuitable. James500 (talk) 18:57, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • At best the books are about tax controversies. Not using the term in any manner other then to describe a controversy that involves taxes. There's books on food controversies, marriage controversies, etc it's endless. Just putting a descriptive word before controversy doesn't make a whole new term worthy of an article. Caffeyw (talk) 18:35, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    • No, "controversy"is another word for "case". In other words, we are talking about tax litigation. To give an analagous example, "criminal case" presently redirects to "trial". James500 (talk) 18:57, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• Merge to income tax audit, as this is really part of the larger, clearer topic of being audited. (And I suggest that in the future, those who argue on the basis of all-the-sources-if-you-just-use-thr-right-Google actually point to specific sources.) -Nat Gertler (talk) 19:11, 14 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
• I created this article, and was frankly surprised to find it wasn't already on the site. I came across capitalized phrase on a lawyer friend's website, and went to look it up on the site only to find nothing. Wikipedia plays a great role in taking the (relatively) unknown world and making it known, but can sometimes be a little behind with documenting industry specific terms. There are hundreds and thousands of results that come up when you Google Tax Controversy. It is apparently a very common legal term, and many very well known companies such as PriceWaterHouseCoopers and Deloitte have divisions specifically named as offering Tax Controversy services. Both the University of California, Los Angeles and New York University have Tax Controversy Institutes that host annual conferences on the subject. I would add links to their sites but I suspect they would be removed as my earlier references were. So you can see that with this field of law, it is not a simple pairing of dictionary words, as one of the commentators above posted. To illustrate this point another way, I offer up the contrasting uncapitalized usage of the words tax controversy when discussing corporations' failure to pay income tax by offshoring operations, or discussions related to raising taxes on the top 1% of income earners. Those usages would not warrant their own entry. On a related note, why wouldn't the same dictionary argument apply to the Audit Representation entry? It's a slippery slope. Another commenter above suggested that this is just tax litigation. It turns out to be more than that. When you are audited, you are not automatically in litigation. Often the Tax Controversy legal services work with the IRS to resolve differences without requiring costly litigation. To conclude, Wikipedia is a great open platform that encourages discussion and contribution from a wide range of people. It would be a shame if people's unfamiliarity with a specific technical term causes its deletion, because that's defeating the whole purpose of this great site. I don't see any downside in including this article, and hope to eventually expand upon it and include third party references.Timtempleton (talk) 20:07, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Except Google doesn't really have the hundreds of thousands of results they reported; if you start to page through those results, you'll find somewhere around the 400th one, they'll tell you that that's all the unique results they have. And some of those do not relate to "tax controversy" as being discussed here, but are merely the two words arising together for some other reason (two politicians arguing over a sales tax controversy, for example). Whether tax audit representation deserves its own article is a separate question. --Nat Gertler (talk) 20:27, 16 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• Thanks for the good point on the number of results - I don't want my case to be based on erroneous info. Nonetheless, there are too many to count, real, valid sites that have discussions of Tax Controversy practices. This illustrates widespread adoption, the benchmark for keeping the entry up.Timtempleton (talk) 00:39, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• There certainly seems to be a number of lawyer sites using the term to discuss services that they offer. That doesn't mean that we have good reliable sources that will give us non-biased information that will expand this beyond a definition, nor that this information is not best seen within the context of some larger discussion, with a redirect pointing the term "tax controversy" to there. "Widespread adoption" of a term does not mean that we need to keep an article about it, particularly when it could be more effectively merged. --Nat Gertler (talk) 02:01, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• It doesn't seem that we're in agreement about the significance of the term. I'll ask you to reread my earlier post, with the references to not lawyer sites but also how major financial consulting firms and large universities are using the phrase within their business models. Tax Controversy is not an audit or tax litigation - it is a reference to having a tax dispute with a tax agency. It doesn't have to be the IRS - it can be worldwide, and I just edited the article to clarify that point. That makes it harder to merge into a single other article. It really is its own unique animal. If you want to merge the IRS, the Central French Government, Swedish Tax Agency and Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, among others into the Tax article, then I suppose we could add Tax Controversy as a subsubject. That seems like a lot of work when this works fine as a standalone article. Do you think if I found and linked to legal research papers, that would help satisfy the sourcing requirement? I'd like to hear from Caffeyw.Timtempleton (talk) 07:37, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• At this point, what it's looking like is a standalone definition, and plenty of folks using a term is a great reason to have a definition... in Wiktionary. Yes, income tax audit is inappropriately US-centric at the moment, and is labeled as such. But can you point me to some specific non-promotional sources (preferably something online) that show that there is more to say about this? --Nat Gertler (talk) 13:25, 17 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

• The term has been used for a while in the legal field. Here's a 1999 article from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.^[1]

References

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.