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Thursday, February 01, 2018

OECD's Gurría: 'Don't jump the gun' on digital tax 

Paradise lost: The imminent fall of tax havens

Bureaucrats clock up $150m in travel bills - Marco Polos via PerthNow

 
Oxfam, Reward Work, Not Wealth:
Last year saw the biggest increase in billionaires in history, one more every two days. Billionaires saw their wealth increase by $762bn in 12 months. This huge increase could have ended global extreme poverty seven times over. 82% of all wealth created in the last year went to the top 1%, while the bottom 50% saw no increase at all. Dangerous, poorly paid work for the many is supporting extreme wealth for the few. Women are in the worst work, and almost all the super-rich are men. Governments must create a more equal society by prioritizing ordinary workers and small-scale food producers instead of the rich and powerful.

New York Times editorial, Are Corporate Tax Cuts Raising Pay? Yes, for Bosses:
Recent announcements by Apple, Walmart, AT&T, Starbucks and other businesses that they are giving workers raises, repatriating foreign profits and investing in the United States because of the tax bill Congress passed last year are clearly music to the ears of President Trump and Republican lawmakers. But these statements are also cleverly designed public relations spin that tells us little about the actual long-term economic impact of the tax law.
Clemens Fuest (University of Munich), Andreas Peichl (University of Munich) & Sebastian Siegloch (University of Mannheim), Do Higher Corporate Taxes Reduce Wages? Micro Evidence from Germany (2017):
This paper estimates the incidence of corporate taxes on wages using a 20-year panel of German municipalities exploiting 6,800 tax changes for identification. Using event study designs and differences-in-differences models, we find that workers bear about half of the total tax burden.

Arthur J. Cockfield (Queen's University), How Countries Should Share Tax Information, 50 Vand. J. Transnat'l L. 1091 (2017):
Offshore tax evasion, international money laundering, and aggressive international tax planning significantly reduce government revenues. In particular, for some low-income countries the amount of capital flight (where elites move and hide monies offshore in tax havens) exceeds foreign aid. Governments struggle to enforce their tax laws to constrain these actions, and they are inhibited by a lack of information concerning international capital flows. The main international policy response to these developments has been to promote global financial transparency through heightened cross-border exchanges of tax information. The Article examines elements of optimal cross-border tax information exchange laws and policies by focusing on three key challenges: information quality, taxpayer privacy, and enforcement.

A super blue blood moon behind a mountain is seen from Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway. Picture: AFP
A super blue blood moon behind a mountain is seen from Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway
The BRA Had a Better View than BONDI 
Old Wine In New Bottles – Strengthening Liberal Values by KELLY O'DWYER

Leandra Lederman (Indiana) presents Information Matters in Tax Enforcement at UC-Irvine today as part of its Tax Law and Policy Colloquium Series hosted by Omri Marian:
Most legal and economics scholars recognize that the government needs information about taxpayers’ transactions in order to determine whether their reporting is honest, and that third-party reporting helps the government obtain that information. Yet, a recent paper by Professor Wei Cui [Taxation Without Information: The Institutional Foundations of Modern Tax Collection] asserts that “modern governments can practice ‘taxation without information.’” Cui’s argument rests on two premises: (1) “giving governments effective access to taxpayer information through third parties does not explain the success of modern tax administration” because, he argues, other important taxes, such as the value added tax (VAT), do not involve information reporting; and (2) modern tax administration succeeds because business firms are “sites of social cooperation under the rule of law,” fostering compliance. As this Essay argues, the literature demonstrates that Cui is wrong on both points.

Just weeks after the federal government adopted the biggest tax overhaul in three decades, the effects are rippling through corner offices and boardrooms, with companies large and small dusting off once-shelved plans, re-evaluating existing projects and exploring new investment in factories and equipment. ...
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