Law Commons^™

It-Apas: Harmonizing Inconsistent Transfer Pricing Rules In Income Tax - Customs - Vat, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

In most jurisdictions there are three separate spheres of transfer pricing analysis - income tax, customs and VAT. Although they share policy objectives, terminology and frequently borrowing methodologies from one another these domestic transfer pricing systems are not in harmony.

Businesses find this lack of harmony costly, problematical, but also a planning opportunity. The door is open for arbitrage.

What if the transfer pricing rules within a jurisdiction were harmonized? The World Customs Organization (WCO) and the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are considering this question.

This paper synthesizes the range of transfer pricing regimes currently in use, …

Uk Car-Flipping: The Vat Fraud Market-Place And Certified Solutions, Richard Thompson Ainsworth

Faculty Scholarship

Missing Trader Intra-Community (MTIC) fraud and its offspring carousel fraud and contra trading fraud are siphoning huge amounts of VAT revenue from the UK Treasury. This fraud is not a function of the goods involved. It is a function of the market-place. Recently another type of market-place dependent VAT fraud has taken hold in the UK - car-flipping.

In some instances the market-place where these frauds festers is a pre-existing or natural market-place, one that grows out of legitimate commercial practices. Fraudsters enter this market-place (so the argument goes) and take advantage of legitimate businesses who unwittingly get caught up …

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 …

Tax Shelters And The Code: Navigating Between Text And Intent, Steven Dean, Lawrence M. Solan

Faculty Scholarship

Tax shelters raise difficult problems of statutory interpretation. In her interesting article, Of Lenity, Chevron, and KPMG, Kristin Hickman explores one of them: the recent tendency of courts to apply the rule of lenity in civil cases, potentially leading to a narrow interpretation of the Code that would undermine efforts to collect the taxes that Congress intended to impose. In that article and in earlier work, she also discusses the importance of courts deferring to the IRS under the Chevron doctrine as a tool in collecting taxes. We agree both with Hickman's articulation and analysis of this problem. Here, we …

Consumer Law As Tax Alternative, Rory Van Loo

Faculty Scholarship

Policymakers and scholars have in distributional conversations traditionally ignored consumer laws. Tax law dominates distributional conversations partly because legal rules are seen as less efficient and partly because consumer law research speaks to narrow and siloed contexts. Even millions of dollars in reduced credit card fees seem trivial compared to the trillion-dollar growth in income inequality that has sparked concern in recent decades. This Article is the first to synthesize the fragmented studies quantifying inefficiently higher consumer prices across diverse markets — called overcharge. These studies indicate that laws reducing overcharge could make a substantial reduction in inequality. Moreover, this …

Financial Accounting And Corporate Behavior, David I. Walker

Faculty Scholarship

The power of financial accounting to shape corporate behavior is underappreciated. Positive accounting theory teaches that even cosmetic changes in reported earnings can affect share value, not because market participants are unable to see through such changes to the underlying fundamentals, but because of implicit or explicit contracts that are based on reported earnings and transaction costs. However, agency theory suggests that accounting choices and corporate responses to accounting standard changes will not necessarily be those that maximize share value. For a number of reasons, including the fact that executive compensation often is tied to reported earnings, managerial preferences for …