Law Commons^™

Vat Triangulation With A Us Middleman Vstr, C-587/10, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

It is not every day that an American firm finds itself in the middle of an EU VAT controversy that significantly develops the law. However, the September 27, 2012 decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) does just that. The case is Vogtländische Straβen-,Tief- und Rohrleitungsbau GmbH Rodewisch (VSTR) v. Finanzamt Plauen.

In November 1998 Atlantic International Trading Company (AIT), an American company established in New York, NY, purchased two stone-crushers from VSTR, a firm established in Germany. AIT quickly re-sold the stone-crushers to an end user established in Finland. The VSTR/AIT contract was “ex works,” that is AIT …

Vat Fraud & Triangulation, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

Missing trader intra-community (MTIC) fraud has received a lot of domestic enforcement attention. True cross border enforcement (joint or coordinated multi-Member State audit) has been limited. There are signs that this is changing as the Member States become more aggressive in their search for revenue.

Along with this shift in enforcement focus, triangulation analysis has moved from being an interesting aspect of the MTIC fraud structure to the central element in a larger understanding of how a fraudster thinks and how he carries out his fraud. We are coming to understand that triangulations are not only the mechanism of how …

Real-Time Collection Of The Value-Added Tax: Some Business And Legal Implications, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Boryana Madzharova

Faculty Scholarship

Recent estimates of the level of VAT fraud in the EU are commensurate with the EU budget. With the Green paper on the future of VAT, the European Commission stressed the urgency and necessity of comprehensive VAT reforms. This paper analyses the business and legal implications of the recently proposed split-payment mechanism, which, if implemented, would move VAT’s method of collection to real-time. The discussion is positioned in the context of two increasingly visible trends in the EU – the general shift towards greater reliance on indirect taxation and the growing popularity of electronic payment instruments. The potential implementation of …

The Private Costs Of Patent Litigation, James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer

Faculty Scholarship

This paper estimates the total cost of patent litigation to alleged infringers. We use a large sample of stock market event studies around the date of lawsuit filings for US public firms from 1984-99. We find that the total costs of litigation are much greater than legal fees and costs are large even for lawsuits that settle. Lawsuits cost alleged infringers about $28.7 million ($92) in the mean and $2.9 million in the median. Moreover, infringement risk rose sharply during the late 1990s to over 14% of R&D spending. Small firms have lower risk relative to R&D.

Reverse Regulatory Arbitrage: An Auction Approach To Regulatory Assignments, Frederick Tung, M Todd Henderson

Faculty Scholarship

In the years before the Financial Crisis, banks got to pick their regulators, engaging in a form of regulatory arbitrage that we now know was a race to the bottom. We propose to turn the tables on the banks by allowing regulators, specifically, bank examiners, to choose the banks they regulate. We call this “reverse regulatory arbitrage,” and we think it can help improve regulatory outcomes. Building on our prior work that proposes to pay bank examiners for performance — by giving them financial incentives to avoid bank failures — we argue that bank supervisory assignments should be set through …

Vat Fraud In The Customer Chain - The German Perfect Storm Cases, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

German civil and criminal courts have not always agreed over whether to allow a taxpayer to zero-rate intra-Community supplies when the taxpayer making the supply knew (or should have known) that his buyer in the other Member State intended to fraudulently evade VAT as a missing trader. This is no longer the case. Zero-rating of intra-community supplies is now being denied in German civil and criminal courts.

This paper considers how far Germany appears to be extending the law in this area. In 2011 six cases were heard by the Bundesfinanzhof (German Supreme Tax Court) that demonstrate both (a) the …

Medical Devices Excise Tax (Mdet) -- A Market-Specific Vat?, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Andrew Shact, Gail Wasylyshyn

Faculty Scholarship

VATs flourish in complex, clearly defined markets. New York discovered this when it converted its single-stage retail sales tax on hotel rooms, the Hotel Room Occupancy Tax (HROT), into a multi-stage European-style VAT. The HROT VAT-conversion demonstrates that (a) in a clearly defined market where (b) a single stage tax is imposed on (c) only part of a complex supply chain that (d) losses attributable to supply-chain-fragmentation can be remedied by moving to a multi-stage VAT.

The Medical Devices Excise Tax (MDET) imposes as 2.3% excise tax on the sale by manufacturers, producers or importers of clearly identified medical devises …

Mahagében Kft & Péter Dávid: Re-Directing The Eu Vat's Perfect Storm, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

On June 21, 2012 the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) rendered judgment on two Hungarian references, Mahagében kft v. Nemzeti Adó-és Vámhivatal Dél-dunántúli Regionális Adó Fölgazgatósága and Péter Dávid v. Nemzeti Adó-és Vámhivatal Dél-dunántúli Regionális Adó Fölgazgatósága (Mahagében/Dávid). The Mahagében/Dávid decisions clarify the CJEU’s earlier holdings in the joined cases of Alex Kittel v. Belgium and Belgium v. Recolta Recycling SPRL (Kittel/Recolta).

Kittel/Recolta is a critically important decision. It is central to the EU’s anti-fraud effort. It is one of three legal imperatives that earlier this year appeared to be coalescing into a Perfect (enforcement) Storm.

After …

A Perfect Storm In The Eu Vat: Kittel, 'R' And Marc, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

EU VAT authorities are close to turning the tables on missing traders. For many years organized fraudsters have been stealing huge amounts of VAT on the domestic re-sale of exempt cross-border supplies. Losses have been enormous whether the transactions are in goods (notably cell phones and computer chips) or in tradable services (CO2 permits and VoIP). No market has been safe from the fraudsters.

Answers are developing, but these answers may look more like Armageddon than measured enforcement. Solutions are so draconian, and so all-encompassing that very few intra-community traders will feel safe from the gathering storm. The situation is …

Refund Fraud? - Real-Time Solution! Digital Security Borrowed From The Vat (Brazil, Quebec, & Belgium), Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

This article provides support for a proposal to eliminate refund fraud in the U.S. by turning Forms W-2, and 1099 into self-certified/ self-authenticated tax documents. The proposal suggests that a “digital signature” of these documents should be taken after they are completed. The signature should then be made part of the final document.

This proposal was initially advanced in Refund Fraud? Real-Time Solution! The underlying premise of that article was that the US could dramatically reduce, if not eliminate, refund fraud if it borrowing digital security techniques from the VAT. The article did not however, explain or expand upon these …

Vat Experimentation -- New York & Illinois, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

US States are experimenting with VATs to solve market-specific problems with tax compliance and revenue yields. Experimentation has been going on for years. Sometimes the experiment is a success; at other times it needs more work.

Although not called VATs either before, during or after adoption – that is what these experiments are. Market-specific VATs are producing benefits long promoted by VAT advocates, notably: an increase in revenue without an increase in tax rates; increased administrative efficiency without significant costs to business; more stable deposits from fractionated payments; and lower enforcement costs from the self-enforcing nature of the VAT.

There …

Transfer Pricing: The Cup -- Case Studies: Australia, Us, Uk, Norway And Canada, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Andrew Shact

Faculty Scholarship

All transfer pricing regimes give priority to the comparable uncontrolled price (CUP) method. Despite declarations that transfer pricing is a search for the “best method” or “most appropriate method,” all systems concede that the search is over when an exact comparable is found because a CUP is preferred over all methods. The best CUP is an exact CUP because it provides an arm’s length price that is not calculated. The price emerges directly from the comparison.

CUPs have traditionally been the most commonly applied method for both taxpayers and the government. They are the judicial gold standard. They hold sway …

Black Swans: Recapitulative Statements/Vies (Vat) & Use Tax Reciprocity (Rst), Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

There is fundamentally no difference between a value added tax (VAT), and a retail sales tax (RST) when it comes to collecting the tax on cross-border sales. If (under a VAT) a seller is allowed to “zero-rate” cross-border sales, or if (under a RST) a seller is exempt from collecting the tax on cross-border sales, the critical enforcement question is exactly the same – how does the system assure that the buyer will self-assess (and pay) the tax?

The simple answer is that the tax administration audits. The more complicated answer notes that the effectiveness of the audit (by the …

Paying Bank Examiners For Performance, Frederick Tung, M. Todd Henderson

Faculty Scholarship

Investigations into the recent financial crisis have found that banking regulators knew or should have known of many of the problems that would ultimately cripple the finance industry. We argue that their failure to address those problems prior to the crisis was at least partly due to misaligned incentives for bank examiners that encourage inadequate inspection and forbearance and discourage the curbing of ill-advised risk taking. We recommend changing examiners’ incentives to better align them with the public good. Specifically, banking regulators should be “paid for performance” — rewarded for nurturing long-term health for the banks they oversee as well …

An American Look At Zappers: A Paper For The Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, Revisionssicheres System Zur Aufzeichnung Von Kassenvorgängen Und Messinformationenthe, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

The common observation in the U.S. is that enforcement against technology-facilitated sales suppression has fallen through an intra-jurisdictional crack. Neither federal nor state auditors systemically target this area. But this is changing, and the change is coming from the state side.

This paper has two main parts. First, it summarizes the current state of sales suppression enforcement in the U.S. Secondly, it reviews the international solutions that are attracting the most U.S. attention. A conclusion indicates likely directions for U.S. enforcement.

Georgia is the first state to take action. On May 3, 2011 Georgia added code section 16-9-62 to Georgia …

Refund Fraud? Real-Time Solution!, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

When seven million dependents vanished from the tax rolls in 1986 the IRS recovered three billion dollars in revenue. A simple enforcement measure was applied. Taxpayers were required to list the social security number (SSN) for any dependent they claimed on their tax return. Costing next to nothing to implement, the benefits of this enforcement action continue to this day.

A similar enforcement measure could be employed against refund fraud. Even though the solution is not as simple as that adopted in 1986, it is similar. The effort is worth making. The revenue loss is much larger. As before, the …

Transfer Pricing: Data Dumps And Comparability - Us, Uk, Canadian, And Australian Case Studies, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Andrew Shact

Faculty Scholarship

Comparability is the heart of transfer pricing. The OECD, U.K., Canadian, Australian, and U.S. transfer pricing rules all echo one another on how critically important the comparability analysis is. Performing this analysis and proving comparability, however, is a demanding exercise.

What makes proving comparability so difficult is that the analysis is two sided. Both controlled and uncontrolled transactions must be thoroughly analyzed. Just as much effort needs to be applied to determine the functions, contract terms, risks and the economic conditions for the unrelated party comparables as is spent on analyzing the related parties (taxpayers).

But there is more to …

Bank Ceos, Inside Debt Compensation, And The Global Financial Crisis, Frederick Tung, Xue Wang

Faculty Scholarship

Bank executives’ compensation has been widely identified as a culprit in the Global Financial Crisis, and reform of banker pay is high on the public policy agenda. While Congress targeted its reforms primarily at bankers’ equity-based pay incentives, empirical research fails to show any correlation between bank CEO equity incentives and bank performance in the Financial Crisis. We offer an alternative analysis, hypothesizing that bank CEOs’ inside debt incentives correlate with reduced bank risk taking and improved bank performance in the Crisis. A nascent literature shows that inside debt may dampen CEOs’ risk taking incentives. Unlike the industrial firms that …