Preachers and Practisers: Certainty of Interesting Taxing Times Ahead

It is Friday ...  and for all good Catholic gals and guys time for Mohr Fish ...

Speaking of food without ham, Fordham hosts a two-day symposium on We Are What We Tax

D. Johnson & Mark Koyama (both of George Mason University, Department of Economics), Taxes, Lawyers, and the Decline of Witch Trials in France, 57 J.L. & Econ. 77 (2014):

This paper explores the rise of the fiscal state in the early modern period and its impact on legal capacity. To measure legal capacity, we establish that witchcraft trials were more likely to take place where the central state had weak legal institutions.

How Ireland became an offshore financial centre

Voluntary disclosure of offshore tax evasion VoxEU 

Howard Gleckman, Could We Get the Tax Code Down to Three Pages? Why Would We Want To? (TaxVox). “And keep in mind that the vast bulk of today’s law governs the taxation of businesses, not individuals. And businesses are very complicated.

New York Times:  Even Famous Female Economists Get No Respect, by Justin Wolfers (Michigan):

Men’s voices tend to dominate economic debate, although perhaps this is shaped by how we talk about the contributions of female economists. This is easiest to see in how we discuss the work of economist power couples. Remembering the journalistic cliché that one is an example, two is a coincidence and three is a trend, I figured it worth exploring how female economists are treated.

Find Open Access Dissertations and Theses to all Jozef Imrich's ideas: “PQDT Open provides the full text of open access dissertations and theses free of charge. You can quickly and easily locate dissertations and theses relevant to your discipline, and view the complete text in PDF format. Open Access Publishing – The authors of these dissertations and theses have opted to publish as open access. Open Access Publishing is a new service offered by ProQuest’s UMI Dissertation Publishing…”
See also – via EBSCO – Searching: American Doctoral Dissertations, 1933 – 1955
 

Omri Y. Marian (UC-Irvine), The State Administration of International Tax Avoidance:

In November of 2014, hundreds of advanced tax agreement (ATAs) issued by Luxembourg’s Administration des Contributions Directes (Luxembourg’s Inland Revenue, or LACD) to multinational corporate taxpayers (MNCs) were made public. Using an original dataset generated from a hand-coded sample of 172 leaked documents, this article points out that "the targets of coordinated attempts to combat international tax arbitrage should be tax administrations, and not only taxpayers."

Financial Times op-ed:  A Last Hurrah for Republican Tax Slashers, by James Pethokoukis:
The Republican party’s raison d’être is cutting taxes. It may even be its divine commission. God put Republicans on earth to cut taxes, the conservative columnist, Robert Novak, once said, and failure to do that means “they have no useful function”.

Wall Street Journal op-ed:  The Latest Lure From Abroad for U.S. Firms—Innovation Boxes, by Denis Hughes (Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners):

All Rise:  Journeys to a Just World:

How can international disputes be resolved in the courtroom rather than on the battlefield? All Rise brings this complex question into sharp and personalized focus through the journeys of seven passionate students of law from India, Israel, Jamaica, Palestine, Russia, Singapore, and Uganda to compete in the world championships in Washington, DC, of the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition (the “Jessup”), the world’s largest simulated court competition. The “court” is the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”), the judicial arm of the United Nations. Against this backdrop, this moving film lays bare the struggles, triumphs and transformations they experience alone and together.

Jason DeBacker (Middle Tennessee), Bradley Heim (Indiana) & Anh Tran (Indiana) & Alexander Yuskavage (U.S. Treasury Department), Legal Enforcement and Corporate Behavior: An Analysis of Tax Aggressiveness After an Audit, 58 J.L. & Econ. 291 (2015):

Contrary to common expectations, legal enforcement may increase subsequent corporate misbehavior.

Daniel Shaviro (NYU) presents The Crossroads versus the Seesaw: Getting a 'Fix' on Recent International Tax Policy Developments at McGill today as part of its Spiegel Sohmer Tax Policy Colloquium Series:

U.S. international tax policy is at a crossroads, say those who urge the United States to adopt what common parlance would call a territorial system.

HMRC Connect: how the taxman is targeting taxpayers' personal data

Accountancy Live, 12/11/15. The increasing power of HMRC’s data manipulation tool, Connect, is a warning for all taxpayers as the authorities gather more powers to interrogate individual taxpayer data and identify potential tax avoidance by analysing individuals' behavioural and spending patterns, warns Neil Tipping, senior tax consultant at CCH.

Michael Hatfield (University of Washington), Taxation and Surveillance: An Agenda, 17 Yale J.L. & Tech. 319 (2015):

Among government agencies, the IRS likely has the surest legal claim to the most information about the most Americans: their hobbies, religious affiliations, reading activities, travel, and medical information are all potentially tax relevant. Privacy scholars have studied the arrival of Big Data, the internet-of-things, and the cooperation of private companies with the government in surveillance, but neither privacy nor tax scholars have considered how these technological advances should impact the U.S. tax system. As government agencies and private companies increasingly pursue what has been described as the “growing gush of data,” the use of these technologies in tax administration will become increasingly important to consider.

China's Social Credit system, computerized Orwell with a government reputation and trust score
NextBigFuture, 31/10/15. By 2020, everyone in China will be enrolled in a vast national database that compiles fiscal and government information, including minor traffic violations, and distils it into a single number ranking each citizen.

SecureAuth partners with BehavioSec to offer behavioral biometrics capability
Biometric Update, 5/11/15. An individual’s unique behavioural biometric pattern is affected by social and psychological factors, which makes it nearly impossible to duplicate or emulate another person’s behavior in front of the computer.  The new capability will enable organizations to integrate behavioural biometric technology into their authentication platforms to strengthen their security measures against attackers.