ATO scandal claims first scalp as Sevag Chalabian quits the law profession
Festival of Outrageous Tax Ideas 2017 - 13 July 2017
Cities for the rich Le Monde Diplomatique
The conventional wisdom about refund anticipation loans, at least among many academics, is that they are predatory lending products that benefit big businesses at the expense of the poor.Andrew Hayashi turns this notion on its head in his insightful paper, The Effects of Refund Anticipation Loans on the Use of Paid Preparers and EITC Take-up.
- [223 Downloads] Can New York Publish President Trump's State Tax Returns?, by Daniel Hemel (Chicago)
- [166 Downloads] A Taxonomy for Tax Loopholes, by Heather Field (UC-Hastings)
- [163 Downloads] The Rise and Fall of the Destination-Based Cash Flow Tax: What Was That All About?, by Daniel Shaviro (NYU)
- [137 Downloads] Shareholder Wealth Effects of Border Adjustment Taxation, by Fabio B. Gaertner (Wisconsin), Jeffrey L. Hoopes (North Carolina) & Edward L. Maydew (North Carolina)
- [133 Downloads] Why Don't White Supremacists Pay Taxes?, by Eric Franklin Amarante (UNLV)
In 2013 the OECD, at the behest of the G20, embarked upon an ambitious project of coordinating and harmonizing countries’ international tax rules under the guise of curtailing multinational companies’ cross-border tax planning, generally referred to as base erosion and profit shifting, or BEPS. The project was finalized with great fanfare in October 2015. But the proclamations of success masked real underlying differences between participant countries. I argue that the project suffered from a number of flaws that that largely precluded effective coordination, as a result of which the project’s recommendations largely gloss over key differences in participants’ goals and commitments while doing nothing to solve the systemic problems it was seeking to address. For example, while a key stated goal of the project was to align the taxation of profits with value creation, there was no attempt made to define the location of value creation, nor to address the fact that this principle is fundamentally at odds with the arm’s length principle that serves as the backbone of transfer pricing rules.
Michael Hatfield (University of Washington), Cybersecurity and Tax Reform, 93 Ind. L.J. ___ (2017):
The IRS collects information on more Americans and handles more money than any other agency. The cybersecurity risks are high. This Article takes seriously both the challenges and the agency's limitations in solving those problems through technological advances. This Article describes the cybersecurity problem as a legal problem for Congress to address rather than merely a digital problem for IRS technicians. By legislation, Congress defines what information is tax relevant, and then the IRS digitally collects, stores, and process the information. Over the years, without any regard for information security, Congress has designed a tax system that requires the IRS to collect more information than it can now protect. But there is ample flexibility for Congress to reform tax law to decrease the information held by the IRS and increase the likelihood the IRS can defend it. This Article explores specific ways in which the tax laws and its administration could be changed to simplify the information needs of the IRS, making its information system both a less appealing and a more defensible cyberattack target. In short, if the tax law were simpler in specific ways, the information technology needs at the IRS would be simpler, and adequate cybersecurity for it would be easier.
- Lotta Björklund Larsen (Linköping Universit), Karin Thoresson & Ulf Johannesson, A Thrice-Told Tale: A Collaboration Between The Swedish Tax Agency And Academia, 3 J. Tax Admin. 6 (2017)
- Richard Collier (Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation), Tax Competition, Tax Co-Operation and BEPS, 3 J. Tax Admin. 22 (2017)
- Deogratius Ng'winula Mahangila ( University of Dar es Salaam Business School, Tanzania), The Impact of Tax Compliance Costs On Tax Compliance Behaviour, 3 J. Tax Admin. 57 (2017)
- Kristin E. Hickman (Minnesota), Administrative Law's Growing Influence on U.S.Tax Administration, 3 J. Tax Admin. 82 (2017)
- Stephen Daly (Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London), Tax Exceptionalism: A UK Perspective, 3 J. Tax Admin. 95 (2017)
QUESTION ASKED: Who Does The FBI Work For?
Ben Domenech:
There’s no reason to beat around the bush here: what the FBI is claiming is mind-boggling when they claim the shooter had no target in mind. Consider the number of accidents of circumstance you would have to believe were going on here to not have the shooter doing what seems obvious from every piece of evidence we have: researching and planning for an attack on Republicans of some kind, particularly looking for an opportunity when security will be low and vulnerability will be high. This was an attack, not an “anger management” problem.Step back, though, and think on the institutional conclusions here. Considering how ludicrous the FBI’s conclusions are as it relates to an attack on the third ranking member of the House of Representatives, you might reconsider whether to trust the FBI’s conclusions in other areas, as well.
Tools for debunkers
First Draft partnered with Full Fact ahead of the recent British general election. In this article, members of that team look at the various tools they used to surface the fakes that were doing well on social media.
14 articles for fact-conscious science writers
The science reporters and fact-checkers leading the Poynter-organized SciFacts workshop put together a list of 14 reference articles for those seeking to report accurately and fight misinformation. Find them all in this Twitter thread.
Wonder Woman vs. Superman vs. misinformation
The claim that Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot earned far less for her work than Henry Cavill as Superman sent Twitter on a spin.The evidence, however, was terribly scant; and ELLE, which had run the story, fudged its original article with an "update" that should really have read "Correction."
He's mad, and he's fact-checking
The Angry Chef has a new target: alternative facts about nutrition and health. The Guardian talked with him about his crusade to debunk unhealthy health myths.