In the following Miami Herald article on excessive spending in college sports, UM Law Professor Frances R. Hill says “a combination of political clout and the complexities of tax law will keep the feds out of college sports.” Professor Hill teaches courses in taxation, constitutional law, and bankruptcy. She is the director of the Law School's Graduate Program in Taxation.

MiamiHerald.com
January 5, 2009

Dolphin Stadium to host championship of tax dodges

By  Fred Grimm

It may look like just another over-hyped athletic event: that BCS championship super-spectacle set for Thursday night at Dolphin Stadium.

Try to visualize the game through the eyes of disinterested taxpayers. What they'll see, on a field festooned with tax-exempt corporate logos, is the national championship of tax dodges.

Tax-deductible contributions to jock booster clubs make up most of the salaries paid to the multimillionaire coaches pacing the sidelines. In this game, they just happen to be the two highest-paid public officials, respectively, in their home states.

Fans of the University of Florida and Oklahoma University might think of Urban Meyer or Bob Stoops, with their $3 million-plus annual salaries (not to mention bonuses), as their coaches. Actually, thanks to an elastic interpretation of the federal tax code, Urban and Bob will be toiling on behalf of all us taxpayers. Working for the public good. That's the law.

Football fans unfamiliar with the vagaries of 501(c)3 charities might not discern differences between the game played Sunday, when the Miami Dolphins were pummeled by the Baltimore Ravens, and the BCS championship game at the same address. Of course, the Dolphins were eliminated in a playoff game, a concept that appalls the big-money universities involved in the Bowl Championship Series.

But the old boys of the tax-exempt organizations frolicking in the skyboxes Thursday must, by law, be engaged in a strictly educational pursuit. It may look like an ordinary football contest to casual fans, but they're witnessing an orgy of tax-deductible charity.

Paying Urban Meyer $3.25 million a year to coach a football team might reflect misplaced priorities in any year, but in 2009, with Florida's public universities suffering ghastly budget cuts, it's downright unseemly. But Meyers and Stoops reflect a national epidemic. The average major university football coach makes three times more than the average college president, five times more than the average dean, 10 times more than the average tenured professor. At big-time football factories, the top assistant coaches knock down more than the college presidents.

''It's simply ludicrous,'' said David Ridpath of Ohio University's School of Recreation and Sport Sciences and a member of the Drake Group, a group of academics in Quixotic pursuit of academic integrity in college sports.

Ridpath admits that Congress has demonstrated only fleeting interest in fixing tax loopholes that encourage and enable nonprofit educational institutions to throw money around like billionaire-owned professional teams. But this year, amid all the anger over the exclusionary tactics of the us-only BCS member schools (Ridpath sees a potential restraint-of-trade issue), he hopes Washington might finally tear into the whole unseemly mess.

But Frances Hill, the University of Miami Law School's expert on federal tax law, suspects a combination of political clout (big-time football boosters often double as big-time political contributors) and the complexities of tax law will keep the feds out of college sports.

Hill suggested that reform might come when college trustees sober up and remember a basic requirement of the federal tax code. It ought to be a matter of values as much as law, she said. Tax-deductible expenditures, Hill said, ``must be beneficial to the public.''

Thursday night, between commercials, see if you can spot the public benefit.

posted 15-January-2009