Publications for Taylor A. Gast

On Thursday the U.S. Senate passed the Paycheck Protection Program Flexibility Act of 2020 (the “Act”), and the president is expected to sign it into law. The Act loosens several of the Paycheck Protection Program’s requirements. PPP borrowers now have significantly longer to spend loan proceeds, rehire employees, and restore their wages to avoid reductions to loan forgiveness.

Public pension systems are increasingly underfunded. Data released in 2017 indicates that the median state funding ratio (the percentage of assets that a state has available for future payments to retirees) fell to 71.1 percent in 2016, down from 74.5 percent in 2015.

Criminals have increasingly targeted the information necessary to fraudulently obtain tax refunds in recent years. While this goal remains a constant, thieves are constantly developing new ways to obtain this information.

It's 4:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon when I receive a call from a company 's legal director. The director tells me that a company executive was traveling when the executive received an urgent email that appeared to be from the company's CEO, asking for a document containing sensitive information of all the organization's employees. After forwarding the requested document, the executive realized that the email was not from the CEO's email address, but from a similar address- now a criminal holds sensitive information.

A recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit (the “Sixth Circuit”) may make it easier for plaintiffs to bring costly lawsuits against companies that allow sensitive data to fall into the wrong hands. 

Two studies conducted recently resulted in data-driven articles that shed greater light on the issue of when, and why, courts accept veil piercing arguments.