Taxation-Transnational Commons^™

Tax Neutrality And Tax Amenities, David Hasen

Publications

Efforts to identify and implement an appropriate tax neutrality benchmark have been persistent themes in scholarly and policy debates on international taxation for fifty years. This paper questions whether the concept of tax neutrality has been adequately specified for analyzing the efficiency properties of international tax systems. As distinct from the closed-economy setting, in the open-economy setting, neither tax revenues received nor the burdens that tax revenues pay for may be taken as fixed. Because tax revenues finance infrastructure and other productivity-enhancing goods - so-called "tax amenities" - and because capital burdens infrastructure, the reallocation of tax revenues among jurisdictions …

Symposium Introduction: Offshore Accounts, Corporate Income Shifting, And Executive Compensation, Leslie Book

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Some Suggestions For Tax Reform, Michael C. Durst

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Go West: How The Irs Should Foster Innovation In Its Agents, T. Keith Fogg

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Offshore Accounts: Insider's Summary Of Fatca And Its Potential Future, J. Richard Harvey Jr.

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Use Of Voluntary Disclosure Initiatives In The Battle Against Offshore Tax Evasion, Leandra Lederman

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ask For Help, Uncle Sam: The Future Of Global Tax Reporting, Susan C. Morse

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Effective Tax Rate Of The Largest Us And Eu Multinationals, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Yaron Lahav

Articles

The United States has the second highest statutory corporate tax rate in the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) (after Japan).1 This has not always been the case. After the Tax Reform Act of 1986 lowered the U.S. rate from 46% to 34%,2 the United States had one of the lowest statutory corporate tax rates in the OECD.3 In the past twenty-five years, however, the U.S. rate has remained essentially unchanged (it was raised to 35% in 1993),4 while most other OECD countries reduced their statutory rate so that the OECD average statutory corporate tax rate is 25.1%.

What Is Tax Discrimination?, Ruth Mason, Michael S. Knoll

All Faculty Scholarship

Prohibitions of tax discrimination have long appeared in constitutions, tax treaties, trade treaties, and other sources, but despite their ubiquity, little agreement exists as to how such provisions should be interpreted. Some commentators have concluded that tax discrimination is an incoherent concept. In this Article, we argue that in common markets, like the EU and the United States, the best interpretation of the nondiscrimination principle is that it requires what we call “competitive neutrality,” which prevents states from putting residents at a tax-induced competitive advantage or disadvantage relative to nonresidents in securing jobs. We show that, contrary to the prevailing …

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 …

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 …

Transfer Pricing Disputes In The United States, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Book Chapters

In 1988, the US Treasury Department published a study of inter-company pricing (the 'White Paper') that included the following endorsement of the so-called arm's length standard (ALS) for examining the reasonableness of transactions between related parties for tax purposes: The arm's length standard is embodied in all U.S. tax treaties; it is in each major model treaty, including the U.S. Model Convention; it is incorporated into most tax treaties to which the United States is not a party; it has been explicitly adopted by international organizations that have addressed themselves to transfer pricing issues; and virtually every major industrial nation …

The Tax Revenue Capacity Of The U.S. Economy, James R. Hines Jr.

Book Chapters

The United States imposes smaller tax burdens than do other large high-income countries, its 24.8 percent ratio of tax collections to GDP in 2010 representing the lowest fraction among the G-7. The United States also differs from other G-7 countries in relying relatively little on expenditure-type taxes. It follows that there is significant unused tax capacity in the United States that could be deployed to pay the country’s debts, but that the most promising source of additional tax revenue is expenditure taxation that is widely perceived to have very different distributional features than the income taxes on which the U.S. …

The Unjustified Subsidy: Sovereign Wealth Funds And The Foreign Sovereign Tax Exemption, Jennifer Bird-Pollan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The taxation of Sovereign Wealth Funds in the United States is outmoded and due for reconsideration. Offering a tax exemption to the billion dollar investment funds owned by foreign governments is both unfair and ineffective. Founded in the principles of sovereign immunity, the foreign sovereign tax exemption, codified in I.R.C. § 892, fails to satisfy the Congressional goals that motivated its creation. This Article explains the current taxation of foreign sovereigns and, by extension, Sovereign Wealth Funds. It then illustrates that the current exemption is simultaneously too broad, providing a tax exemption for activities that are clearly nongovernmental activities, and …

Symposium On International Taxation And Competitiveness: Introduction And Overview, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, Nicola Sartori

Articles

In February, 2012, the Treasury and White House unveiled President Obama's Framework for Business Tax Reform. A major proposal was to abolish the deferral on income earned by foreign subsidiaries of U.S. corporations ("CFCs").

Meaningless Comparisons: Corporate Tax Reform Discourse In The United States, Omri Y. Marian

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article examines the role that international comparisons play in current corporate tax reform discourse in the United States. Citing the need to make the U.S. corporate tax system more competitive, comparisons are frequently used to assess other jurisdictions' tax-competitiveness, and many legislative proposals are supported by such comparative arguments. Examining such discourse against the background of several theoretical approaches to comparative law, this article argues that, to the extent that comparisons are aimed at providing guidance for prospective reform, this purpose is not well served. Participants in the corporate tax reform discourse, from both sides of the aisle, lack …

China, Wei Cui

Wei Cui

This overview of the current state of China’s income tax treaties highlights three themes. First, the OECD and UN Model Conventions have shaped not only the treaties that China has negotiated but also the country’s domestic tax law itself. A significant number of concepts were introduced into domestic law primarily by borrowing from the treaty framework: these transplants have sometimes enriched affiliated concepts in domestic law, but in other cases, due to the limitations in the treaty framework itself, have held back the development of domestic law. Second, there are important examples where conflicts between China’s treaty obligations and its …

The Vehicle Miles Tax: The Unintended Consequences Of Paying As You Drive, Gregory A. Lush

Gregory A. Lush

No abstract provided.

The Vehicle Miles Tax: The Unintended Consequences Of Paying As You Drive, Gregory A. Lush

Gregory A. Lush

3. A Vehicle Miles Tax Reduces Manufacturer Incentives to Build Electric Vehicles

It follows that if consumers have few incentives to buy electric vehicles, manufacturers will have less of an incentive to make them. If electric cars were not in demand, then why would anyone make them and try to sell them? In a market that is finding electric vehicles to be a tough sell, we need to encourage the sale and production of electric vehicles as much as possible. The effect of enacting a mileage-based tax will be the attrition of automakers producing electric vehicles, furthering the nation’s dependency …

Oecd Project On Harmful Tax Practices, Hugh J. Ault

Hugh J. Ault

Materials presented in conjunction with a keynote speech delivered on May 15, 2003 at a congress on Tax Competition, organized by the European Tax College and held at Tilburg University, the Netherlands.