Tax Shelters and the Code: Navigating Between Text and Intent‪.‬

I. INTRODUCTION Tax shelters raise difficult problems of statutory interpretation. In her interesting article, Of Lenity, Chevron, and KPMG, (1) Kristin Hickman explores one of them: the recent tendency of courts to apply the rule of lenity in civil cases, potentially leading to a narrow interpretation of the Internal Revenue Code (Code) that would undermine efforts to collect the taxes that Congress intended to impose. (2) We agree both with Hickman's articulation and analysis of this problem. In this commentary, we situate more broadly the status of tax shelters in the jurisprudence of statutory interpretation. More specifically, we show how tax shelters are a challenge to ordinary principles of statutory interpretation, whether or not lenity is expanded to make it even more difficult to combat them.