Law Commons^™

Administrative Procedures As Tax Enforcement Tools, Wei Cui, Jeff Hicks, Michael Wiebe

All Faculty Publications

We study how common administrative procedures affect firm tax evasion. We begin with the counter-intuitive observation that many firms bunch above, rather than below, large notches in China’s corporate income tax. Cross-sectional patterns suggest that administrative procedures in the prepayment and refund system served as de facto enforcement tools that prevented some firms from accessing the reduced tax rates below the notches. Following a regulatory reform that eliminated these procedures, bunching below the notches increased dramatically. The results imply a tradeoff between reducing administrative barriers and allowing much taxpayer non-compliance in low-compliance environments.

The Chinese Tax System: Where It Stands And How We Should Study It, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

This book chapter offers an overview of where China’s tax system stands, critically assesses recent scholarship on Chinese taxation, and urges researchers to attend more to normative questions of tax design (e.g., economic efficiency and redistribution). After surveying major tax instruments deployed in China today, the chapter reviews recent studies of taxation’s impact on the Chinese economy, arguing that such scholarship often falls short of providing systematic support for policy analyses, and that ignoring normative questions in tax design leads to poor conceptual framing in positive analyses. The chapter then considers some themes at the intersection between Chinese political institutions …

Deeper Into The Knight: Exploring Deans Knight And Its Effects On The Canadian Gaar, Jinyan Li, Marshall Rothstein, Steve Suarez, Jeffrey Trossman

Articles & Book Chapters

This article discusses the most recent decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in Deans Knight Income Corporation v. Canada (2023) and explores its implications for the Canadian GAAR.

Interlinking Between Income Tax, Citizenship And Democracy? A Case Study Of Canada And China, Jinyan Li

Conference Papers

The interlink between taxation, citizenship and democracy appears to be obvious in Western democracies: citizens are voters, taxpayers and beneficiaries of public spending funded by tax revenues. The literature on the politics of taxation suggests that democratic institutions affect taxation at every stage of the policy-making process, the type of elections and governance model influence the level of redistribution and complexity of the tax system, democracies generally choose policies that are more favorable to the poor than non-democracies, the tax mix varies with the nature of the political regime, and more repressive governments rely less on personal income taxation. Political …

Reimagining A U.S. Corporate Tax Increase As A Supplemental Subtraction Vat, Daniel S. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. federal government raises tax revenue almost exclusively through income taxes, both corporate and individual, whereas its trading partners and competitors rely for their national revenue on both income taxes and “destination-based” value added taxes (VATs), which are not imposed on exports but are imposed on imports. As a result, U.S. corporations, which are subject to U.S. corporate income tax, may be at a serious trade disadvantage to competitor non-U.S. corporations with respect to both U.S. domestic sales and foreign sales, if the U.S. corporate income tax exceeds the foreign country’s income tax imposed on those competitors.

The Biden …

The Canadian Digital Services Tax, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

The Digital Services Tax (DST) may never be enacted in Canada. At least that seems to be what most Canadian tax professionals hope for: the draft Digital Services Tax Act (DSTA), released by the federal government in December 2021, has received little meaningful commentary; likely few Canadian taxpayers potentially affected by the DSTA (and their tax advisors) have attempted to learn from experiences of DST compliance in other countries; and the world also has little to learn from Canadian taxpayers’ preparation for a potential DST. This essay highlights three ways in which this collective dismissal of Canada’s proposed DST is …

Introducing A Global Minimum Tax (Pillar Two) In Canada: Some Knowns And Unknowns, Jinyan Li

Articles & Book Chapters

This paper provides a high-level overview of Pillar Two Global Minimum Tax in terms of its policy objectives, technical design and implications for Canada. After teasing out some significant known and unknown challenges, it offers some thoughts on whether, and if so, how and when Canada can proceed with implementation.

Canadian Qdmtt Challenges, Jinyan Li, Angelo Nikolakakis, Jean-Pierre Vidal

Articles & Book Chapters

Nobody believes that Canada is a tax haven. The fact remains that the effective tax rate of certain entities could be less than 15%. If nothing is done, Pillar Two could therefore apply and taxes that naturally accrue to Canada could end up in foreign hands. We must therefore find a solution and the most obvious is that of adopting a qualified domestic minimum top up tax. Other solutions are possible, but they seem less attractive. A QDMTT still presents some challenges. These challenges include sharing with the provinces, determining the priority to be given to certain foreign taxes relating …

The Mirage Of Mobile Capital, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

Capital mobility has preoccupied scholars of international taxation for more than 30 years. According to prevailing narratives, when capital is highly mobile, countries compete to attract investment, creating a race to the bottom; capital mobility also enables multinational enterprises (MNEs) to shift profits. The appeal of these narratives has culminated in the OECD’s proposed Global Minimum Tax, which declares the aim of substantially curtailing tax competition. This paper suggests, however, that the significance of mobile capital for international taxation may be largely an illusion.

Four deflationary arguments are advanced. First, the rising importance of intangibles for MNEs makes capital less, …

Jotwell's Thirteenth Birthday Celebration, A. Michael Froomkin

Articles

No abstract provided.

Strategic Incentives For Pillar Two Adoption, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

International agreements on the taxation of multinationals emerged rapidly in the last two years, as exemplified by an EU directive on a global minimum tax (commonly known as “Pillar Two”) and other countries’ announcement to implement similar rules. According to a popular narrative, the speed of Pillar Two adoption may be partly attributable to certain enforcement mechanisms that elicit the participation even of those not sympathetic to Pillar Two’s stated goals. Such mechanisms, acting on nations’ self-interest, make Pillar Two “incentive compatible” and characterizes it with a “devilish logic.”

This Article examines this narrative by systematically analyzing strategic incentives for …

Private And Public Sector Models For Entrepreneur, Small Business Owner, And Investor Immigration Pathways, Shane Dizon

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

A New Framework For Digital Taxation, Reuven Avi-Yonah, Young Ran (Christine) Kim, Karen Sam

Articles

The international tax regime has wide implications for business, trade, and the international political economy. Under current law, multinational enterprises do not pay their fair share of taxes to market countries where profits are generated because market countries are only allowed to tax companies with a physical presence there. Digital companies, like Google and Amazon, can operate entirely online, thereby avoiding market country taxes. Multinationals can also exploit existing tax rules by shifting their profits to low-tax jurisdictions, thereby avoiding taxes in the residence country where their headquarters are located.

Recently, a global tax deal was reached to tackle these …

The Pillar 2 Undertaxed Payments Rule Departs From International Consensus And Tax Treaties, Jinyan Li

Articles & Book Chapters

The OECD released pillar 2 model rules last December to provide a template for domestic legislation to implement the agreement reached on October 8, 2021, by almost 140 inclusive framework members on a two-pillar solution to address global ta challenges. The model rules are limited to the income inclusion rule (IIR) and undertaxed payments rule (UTPR) (collectively known as the global anti-base-erosion (GLOBE) regime) in the October agreement. However, and rather surprisingly, the meaning of the letter “P” in the UTPR was effectively changed from payments to profits in the model rules. There was little, if any, public discussion about …

The Case For Subsidizing Harm: Constrained And Costly Pigouvian Taxation With Multiple Externalities, Daniel Schaffa, Daniel Jaqua

Law Faculty Publications

Many activities are subsidized despite generating negative externalities. Examples include needle exchanges and energy production subsidies. We explain this phenomenon by developing a model in which the policymaker faces constraints or costs. We highlight three examples. First, it may be optimal to subsidize a harmful activity if the policymaker cannot set the first-best tax on an externally harmful substitute. Second, it may be optimal to subsidize a harmful production process if the activity mix at lower levels of output uses more harmful activities than the activity mix at higher levels of output. Third, it may be optimal to subsidize a …

Tax And Time: On The Use And Misuse Of Legal Imagination, Anthony C. Infanti

Book Chapters

In daily life and in tax law, time is taken for granted as something that is ever present but beyond our control. Time moves endlessly and relentlessly forward, constantly slipping from our grasp. But what if life were more like science fiction? What if we could, at will, move through time to alter its course? Or what if we could harness time by turning it into an exchangeable commodity, truly using time as money? In fact, there is no need to open a novel or watch a movie to experience time travel or to see time used as a medium …

Tax's Digital Labor Dilemma, Amanda Parsons

Publications

Digitalization has reshaped the relationship between companies and their customers and users. Customers and users increasingly serve a dual role. They are not only consumers but also producers, creating data and content. They are a value-creating workforce, functioning as “digital laborers.”

Digital laborers’ value creation highlights that there are two parts to the question of whether multinational companies are paying their “fair share” of taxes—one of amount and one of location. First, are companies’ total tax bills paid across all countries in line with their global income? Second, is taxing authority over multinational companies’ income being divided amongst countries in …

A New Framework For Digital Taxation, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Young Ran (Christine) Kim, Karen Sam

Articles

The international tax regime has wide implications for business, trade, and the international political economy. Under current law, multinational enterprises do not pay their fair share of taxes to market countries where profits are generated because market countries are only allowed to tax companies with a physical presence there. Digital companies, like Google and Amazon, can operate entirely online, thereby avoiding market country taxes. Multinationals can also exploit existing tax rules by shifting their profits to low-tax jurisdictions, thereby avoiding taxes in the residence country where their headquarters are located.

Recently, a global tax deal was reached to tackle these …

Responding To Mass, Computer-Generated, And Malattributed Comments, Steven J. Balla, Reeve Bull, Bridget C.E. Dooling, Emily Hammond, Michael A. Livermore, Michael Herz, Beth Simone Noveck

Articles

A number of technological and political forces have transformed the once staid and insider dominated notice-and-comment process into a forum for large scale, sometimes messy, participation in regulatory decisionmaking. It is not unheard of for agencies to receive millions of comments on rulemakings; often these comments are received as part of organized mass comment campaigns. In some rulemakings, questions have been raised about whether public comments were submitted under false names, or were automatically generated by computer “bot” programs. In this Article, we examine whether and to what extent such submissions are problematic and make recommendations for how rulemaking agencies …

Tax Harmony: The Promise And Pitfalls Of The Global Minimum Tax, Reuven Avi-Yonah, Young Ran (Christine) Kim

Articles

The rise of globalization has become a double-edged sword for countries seeking to implement a beneficial tax policy. On one hand, there are increased opportunities for attracting foreign capital and the benefits that increased jobs and tax revenue brings to a society. However, there is also much more tax competition among countries to attract foreign capital and investment. As tax competition has grown, effective corporate tax rates have continued to be cut, creating a “race-to-the-bottom” issue.

In 2021, 137 countries forming the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS passed a major milestone in reforming international tax by successfully introducing the framework …

The Global Tax Agreement: Some Truths And Legal Realities, Jinyan Li

All Papers

With much pomp and ceremony, it was announced that member jurisdictions of the G20/OECD BEPS Inclusive Framework “agreed to a two-pillar solution to address the tax challenges from the digitalization of the economy” (the “Two-Pillar Agreement”) This agreement has been hailed by some as “historic”, “momentous”, “revolutionary”, but criticized by others as “harmful to developing countries”, cartelistic power grabbing by a few powerful countries, or neocolonialism. So, is the agreement a cause for celebration or the opposite? What is the chance of the Agreement become real law? In this article, I try to first explain what the two-pillar agreement is …

Critical Tax Theory: Insights From The Us And Opportunities For All, Anthony C. Infanti, Bridget J. Crawford

Articles

At a moment when Australia -- and the world -- finds itself at a "critical juncture" as it reckons with a global pandemic as well as the inequalities that COVID-19 has laid bare, voicing -- and listening to -- critical tax perspectives has become more vital than ever. The economic impact of COVID-19 has precipitated talk of tax reform as nations consider how to pay for aid distributed during the pandemic and how to restart their economies. But more than just a time of crisis, the pandemic can be seen as an unexpected opportunity to break with a past plagued …

World Tax Policy In The World Tax Polity? An Event History Analysis Of Oecd/G20 Beps Inclusive Framework Membership, Shu-Yi Oei

Faculty Scholarship

The last decade has seen the emergence of a new global tax order spearheaded by the OECD and G20 and characterized by increased multilateral consensus and cooperation. This new order appears to reflect the emergence of a new “world tax polity” with shared structures, practices, and norms, which have been shaped through the work of the OECD, G20, and other global actors. But what are the pathways by which this new world tax polity has emerged?

Using event history regression methods, this Article investigates this question by studying membership in the OECD/G20 BEPS Inclusive Framework, a multilateral tax agreement among …

Carving A Path For Legal Scholarship During An Existential Crisis, Adam H. Rosenzweig

Scholarship@WashULaw

The G-7 and G-20 recently announced a “breakthrough” agreement by over 130 countries to adopt and implement a “global minimum tax” proposal. The agreement is reportedly expected to raise over $150 billion in new revenue by closing some of the most notorious tax loopholes in the world; ultimately the deal could reshape global commerce and shore-up beleaguered national finances following the global pandemic. Officials involved in the deal have been quoted as making sweeping statements that the deal was historic, and that it would reshape the global economy, make worldwide taxation fairer, eliminate incentives for corporations to avoid tax, and …

Broken Infrastructure, Del C. Wright Jr.

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Finding The Purpose Of Tax Treatyprovisions Under Gaar: Lessons From Alta Energy, Jinyan Li

Articles & Book Chapters

Establishing the object and purpose of tax treaty provisions lies at the heart of applying antiabuse rules, such as general antiavoidance rules under domestic law and the principal purpose test (PPT) in tax treaties. Tax planning arrangements like treaty shopping, designed to obtain treaty benefits, are not abusive unless they contravene the object and purpose of the provisions relied upon by the taxpayer.

Are Digital Services Taxes Imposed By Other Countries Creditable Under Irc Section 903? Yes. But, What If The Opposite Is True?, Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln Iv

Student Scholarship

This article is divided in the following parts. Part II will discuss and define what Section 903 stands for from a legislative, regulatory, and case perspective. Part III will discuss what digital services taxes are. Part III will define “nexus” and how the concept of “nexus” will relate to Section 903. Part IV concludes by suggesting that digital services taxes do not fall into the traditional statutory paradigm. Ultimately, Section 903 hypothecates that a tax will either be a traditional income tax creditable under Section 901 or tax in the place of that tax. If it does not fall into …

Taxation And Business: The Human Rights Dimension Of Corporate Tax Practices, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Book Chapters

The response of both developed and developing countries to global developments has been first, to shift the tax burden from (mobile) capital to (less mobile) labour, and second, when further increased taxation of labour becomes politically and economically difficult, to cut government services. Thus, globalization and tax competition lead to a fiscal crisis for countries that wish to continue to provide those government services to their citizens, at the same time that demographic factors and increased income inequality, job insecurity and income volatility that result from globalization render such services more necessary. This chapter argues that if government service programs …

New Puzzles In International Tax Agreements, Wei Cui

All Faculty Publications

The G7’s “global minimum tax” accord—followed by a new version of the OECD’s “Two Pillar Solution” and its endorsement by the G20—is accepted by many as evidence for international tax cooperation. But recent policy discussions offer no answer to a basic question: What can countries cooperate to achieve? This Article shows that the answers provided by proponents of the new international tax agreement are alarmingly ad hoc, misleading, and incoherent. Scholarship on corporate taxation has also long failed to identify potentials for international cooperation. The more successful international agreements purport to be, therefore, the more puzzling they become. I …

Repurposing Pillar One Into An Incremental Global Tax For Sustainability: A Collective Response To A Global Crisis, Jinyan Li, Sophie Chatel

Articles & Book Chapters

This article proposes to repurpose the OECD/IF Pillar One Blueprint from a taxing rights reallocation mechanism into an incremental global tax for sustainability. With a common goal and DST-like feature for simplification, the proposal aims to ease the negotiation of essential and drastic simplifications required to deliver a workable solution.