Law Commons^™

A Tale Of Two Subject-To-Tax Rules, Sol Picciotto, Jeffery M. Kadet, Bob Michel

Articles

In this article, we analyze and compare two proposals for a new subject-to-tax rule (STTR) provision to be included in tax treaties, one from the U.N. Tax Committee and the other from the G20/OECD inclusive framework on base erosion and profit shifting. The U.N. proposal is broad, and would clarify that restrictions in tax treaties on taxation of income at the source where it is derived are conditional on that income being taxed at an agreed-upon minimum rate in the country where it is received. The inclusive framework version is much more limited, being confined to payments between connected entities …

New Developments In Us Treaty Overrides, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

This note discusses the reservations added in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to the US-Chile tax treaty and their implications for the treaty override debate.

Tax Treaties, The Constitution, And The Noncompulsory Payment Rule, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

US Tax treaties have been regarded as self-executing since the first treaty (with France) was ratified in 1932. Rebecca Kysar has argued this raises a doubt on whether the treaties are constitutional, because tax treaties (like other treaties) are negotiated by the executive branch and ratified by the Senate with no involvement by the House, and all tax-raising measures must originate in the House under the Origination Clause (U.S. Const. Art I, section 7, clause 7). Her preferred solution is to make tax treaties non-self executing, but that would reverse the universal practice since 1932, and is therefore unlikely. Moreover, …

Globalization, Tax Competition And The Fiscal Crisis Of The Welfare State: A Twentieth Anniversary Retrospective, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Book Chapters

I first met David Rosenbloom in 1993. I had just been hired lo leach international tax at Harvard Law School, and was replacing David, who had taught there for many years. I felt a bit apprehensive approaching such a giant in the field, especially since I actually had little experience in international tax and none in lax treaties. But David was extraordinarily generous. Not only did he give me his materials (some of which made it into my casebook, now co-authored with Yariv Brauner and David's student Diane Ring) but he also agreed to come teach treaties as a guest …

Tax Treaties, The Constitution, And The Noncompulsory Payment Rule, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

US Tax treaties have been regarded as self-executing since the first treaty (with France) was ratified in 1932. Rebecca Kysar has argued this raises a doubt on whether the treaties are constitutional, because tax treaties (like other treaties) are negotiated by the executive branch and ratified by the Senate with no involvement by the House, and all tax-raising measures must originate in the House under the Origination Clause (U.S. Const. Art I, section 7, clause 7). Her preferred solution is to make tax treaties non-self executing, but that would reverse the universal practice since 1932, and is therefore unlikely. Moreover, …

If Not Now, When? U.S. Tax Treaties With Latin America After Tcja, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

Since the 1990s, the US tax treaty network has expanded to include most large developing countries. However, there remains a glaring exception: The US only has two tax treaties in Latin America (Mexico and Venezuela), and one pending tax treaty (Chile). The traditional explanation for why the US has no treaty with, for example, Argentina or Brazil is the US refusal since 1957 to grant tax sparing credits to developing countries. Before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), this explanation was wrong, because the combination of deferral and cross-crediting meant that tax holidays in a source country …

The Superiority Of The Digital Service Tax Over Significant Digital Presence Proposals, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

Responding to calls for reallocating taxing rights over multinationals’ profits to reflect the place of user value creation, the OECD recently announced a Program of Work to implement international tax reform. I use the European Commission’s 2018 proposal to introduce the “significant digital presence” concept into income tax treaties as an example of the type of approach the OECD favors, and argue that it is inferior to recently proposed digital services taxes (DSTs). DSTs directly address the question of where profits should be allocated and taxed, while SDP proposals subordinate this vital question to superfluous treaty conventions. Global tax coordination …

If Not Now, When? Us Tax Treaties With Latin America After Tcja, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

Since the 1990s, the US tax treaty network has expanded to include most large developing countries. However, there remains a glaring exception: The US only has two tax treaties in Latin America (Mexico and Venezuela), and one pending tax treaty (Chile). The traditional explanation for why the US has no treaty with, for example, Argentina or Brazil is the US refusal since 1957 to grant tax sparing credits to developing countries. Before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), this explanation was wrong, because the combination of deferral and cross-crediting meant that tax holidays in a source country …

Does Customary International Tax Law Exist?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

Customary international law is law that “results from a general and consistent practice of states followed by them from a sense of legal obligation.” “International agreements create law for states parties thereto and may lead to the creation of customary international law when such agreements are intended for adherence by states generally and are in fact widely accepted.” Does customary international law (CIL) exist in tax? There are over 3,000 bilateral tax treaties, and they are about 80% identical to each other, but do they create CIL that binds in the absence of a binding treaty, like for example the …

Beat It: Tax Reform And Tax Treaties, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Law & Economics Working Papers

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) includes several provisions that may be viewed as potential violations of US tax treaties. However, most of those potential violations, such as new IRC section 951A and to a large extent new IRC section 59A, are covered by the Savings Clause (US model article 1(4)). The only remaining question is whether IRC section 59A (the “Base Erosion Anti-Abuse Tax”, or BEAT) violates the non-discrimination provision (article 24), which is exempted from the Savings Clause. The answer is no, because foreign related parties are not comparable to US related parties receiving interest or royalties.

Are Taxes Converging?, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Gianluca Mazzoni

Law & Economics Working Papers

Eduardo Baistrocchi’s outstanding new book on tax treaty disputes is the result of an intense five-year global collaborative project among international tax scholars, practitioners and administrators. The book provides an unprecedented set of information and offers the first global qualitative and quantitative analysis on one of the most important debates over international tax scholarship across the last decades, that is, whether an international tax regime exists and is binding upon states as a matter of customary international law.

Breaking Beps: The New International Tax Diplomacy, Itai Grinberg

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

International tax avoidance by multinational corporations is now front-page news. In a time of public austerity, citizens and legislators around the world have focused on the erosion of the corporate income tax base. In response, in 2012 the G-20 — the gathering of the leaders of the world’s twenty largest economies — launched the “Base Erosion and Profit Shifting” (BEPS) project, the most extensive attempt to change international tax norms since the 1920s.

This article is the first to explain that in the course of the BEPS project, the field of international tax has adopted the institutional and procedural architecture …

The Troubling Role Of Tax Treaties, Kim Brooks, Richard Krever

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The notional purpose of tax treaties is to prevent double taxation and tax evasion. The actual purpose is to reallocate taxing rights between an investor’s home jurisdiction (the residence state) and the host jurisdiction (the source state). The effect is to reduce or remove the taxing rights of a source state (a capital importing state) to leave more room for tax in the residence state (a capital exporting state). The revenue costs of agreeing to reduce taxing rights in a treaty are thought to be offset by other benefits. The benefits may be exaggerated. To the extent they may actually …

Direct Taxation, Tax Treaties And Iias: Mixed Objectives, Mixed Results, Martha O'Brien, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Tax treaties and international investment agreements (“IIAs”) have much in common. They share the same purpose of facilitating foreign direct investment (“FDI”), and they provide similar legal protections, such as prohibitions of discriminatory treatment of non-nationals and access to binding dispute resolution. Among other objectives, they are intended to reduce risk and create security and predictability, allowing investors to plan and carry out commercially viable activities under the protection of an international legal regime . In this sense, they both contribute to ensuring the sustainability of FDI and the legal regimes that support it. There are other similarities as well. …

Foreign Administrative Law And International Taxation: A Case Study Of Tax Treaty Implementation In China, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

U.S. taxpayers and the IRS increasingly have to take into account the interactions between U.S. and foreign laws, but they have paid little attention to the administrative law backgrounds of foreign tax laws. In a growing range of cases, the need for such attention has become urgent. This Article describes a novel class of cases encountered by U.S. taxpayers that emanate from tax treaty implementation in China. In these cases, U.S. (and other foreign) investors face certain rules that conflict with common treaty interpretations, and that, at the same time, are not legally binding under Chinese domestic law. The question …

Xilinx Revisited, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

On March 22 the Ninth Circuit released its new opinion in Xilinx v. Commissioner, Doc 2010-6163, 2010 WTD 55-42. 1 As has been expected since the panel withdrew its original opinion, it reversed itself and in a 2-1 opinion held for the taxpayer. The opinion makes it pretty clear why the reversal occurred. It was the result of concentrated pressure by the international tax community and the fact that the government was unwilling to defend the theory on which the panel originally decided the case: that the arm’s-length standard of the section 482 regulations does not apply to cost sharing. …

United States Of America Experience With And Administrative Practice Concerning Mutual Assistance In Tax Affairs, Henry Ordower

All Faculty Scholarship

This report was part of the project for the 2009 meeting of the European Association of Tax Law Professors in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The general reporter for the project was Professor Dr. Roman Seer, Ruhr Universität, Bochum, Germany. The report identifies and discusses United States cooperation with the member states of the European Union through treaties and other agreements on matters of sharing tax and taxpayer information and assisting in assembling tax information and collecting tax revenue. The United States report responds to questions that the general reporter posed and provides additional information concerning United States tax procedure.

Rethinking Treaty Shopping: Lessons For The European Union, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, C. H. Panayi

Book Chapters

Whilst treaty shopping is not a new phenomenon, it remains as controversial as ever. It would seem that the more countries try to deal with it, the wider the disagreements as to what is improper treaty shopping and what is legitimate tax planning. In this paper, we reassess the traditional quasi-definitions of treaty shopping in an attempt to delineate the contours of such practices. We examine the various theoretical arguments advanced to justify the campaign against treaty shopping. We also consider the current trends in treaty shopping and the anti-treaty shopping policies under the OECD Model and the US Model. …

Xilinx And The Arm's-Length Standard, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

On May 7 the Ninth Circuit decided Xilinx v. Commissioner. By a 2-1 majority, the panel reversed the Tax Court and held that costs of employee stock options must be included in the pool of costs subject to a tax-sharing agreement. The Xilinx decision is important for three reasons. First, cost sharing is probably the key element in current transfer pricing law because it is the principal way in which profits from intangibles get shifted from the United States to low-tax jurisdictions. Moreover, informed observers agree that the allocation of income from intangibles is the most important problem in transfer …

Tax Sparing: A Needed Incentive For Foreign Investment In Low-Income Countries Or An Unnecessary Revenue Sacrifice?, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Low income countries often offer tax incentives to induce foreign investment, but the effectiveness of these measures may he limited by the domestic tax practices of investors' high income home countries. Most high-income countries provide a tax credit for the amount of tax paid to a foreign jurisdiction on the international profits of resident companies or individuals. Where no tax, or reduced tax, is paid to the foreign jurisdiction because of a tax incentive, the result is that the investor pays the same amount of tax they would have paid in the absence of the tax incentive, but simply pays …

Philosopher Kings And International Tax: A New Approach To Tax Havens, Tax Flight, And International Tax Cooperation, Steven Dean

Faculty Scholarship

Tax flight treaties could help to solve the $50 billion-a-year problem that tax flight (the evasion of income taxes through the use of offshore tax havens) poses for the United States. Tax flight treaties would offer tax havens a substantial portion of the increased tax revenues that they could generate by providing the United States with the enforcement assistance it needs. Those payments, potentially representing as much as half of the added tax revenue produced by tax flight treaties (and in all probability an amount that is greater than any GDP gains attributable to eliminating waste and other economic distortions …

Commentary, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Book Chapters

David Rosenbloom has delivered an important lecture on an important topic: whether exploiting differences between the tax system of two different jurisdictions to minimize the taxes paid to either or both ("international tax arbitrage") is a problem, and if so, whether anything can be done about it in a world without a "world tax organization." As Rosenbloom states, international tax arbitrage is "the planning focus of the future," and recently has been the focus of considerable discussion and debate (for example, upon the promulgation and subsequent withdrawal under fire of Notice 98-11). Rosenbloom's lecture is one of the first attempts …

Tax Competition, Tax Arbitrage And The International Tax Regime, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

In the past ten years, I have argued repeatedly that a coherent international tax regime exists, embodied both in the tax treaty network and in domestic laws, and that it forms a significant part of international law (both treaty-based and customary). The practical implication is that countries are not free to adopt any international tax rules they please, but rather operate in the context of the regime, which changes in the same ways international law changes over time. Thus, unilateral action is possible, but is also restricted, and countries are generally reluctant to take unilateral actions that violate the basic …

U.S. International Treatment Of Financial Derivatives, Reuven Avi-Yonah, Linda Swartz

Articles

The current proposals to substitute consumption for income as the principal U.S. tax base have already been the topic of considerable commentary in these pages. However, one issue has received relatively little attention in the discussion of the various reform proposals: What potential complications are likely to arise if a single major player in the world's economy unilaterally adopts radical tax reform? The global economy is becoming more and more unified, with multinational corporations dominating world trade and trillions of dollars in portfolio investment flowing across national boundaries. In this economy, what would be the consequences if a single country, …

United States Tax Treaty Policy: An Overview, H. David Rosenbloom, Stanley Langbein

Articles

No abstract provided.