Taxation-Transnational Commons^™

Does Swiss Bank Secrecy Violate International Human Rights?, Stephen B. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Prof. Stephen Cohen, whose academic specialty is taxation, also has an interest in international human rights and served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights in the Carter administration. In this comment, Prof. Cohen asks whether states like Switzerland, which provide bank secrecy for the offshore accounts of wealthy citizens of developing countries, violate internationally recognized human rights. The United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights explicitly recognizes rights to adequate food, clothing, housing, health care, clean water, sanitation, and education. Bank secrecy has a significant human rights impact if it deprives developing countries of tax …

The Battle Over Taxing Offshore Accounts, Itai Grinberg

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The international tax system is in the midst of a contest between automatic information reporting and anonymous withholding models for ensuring that nations have the ability to tax offshore accounts. At stake is the extent of many countries’ capacity to tax investment income of individuals and profits of closely held businesses through an income tax in an increasingly financially integrated world.

Incongruent initiatives of the European Union, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Switzerland, and the United States together represent an emerging international regime in which financial institutions act to facilitate countries’ ability to tax their residents’ offshore …