Krings et al on tax levels, scalar dumping, and democratic preferences

Professors Amy Krings, Dana Kornberg, and Erin Lane recently published Organizing Under Austerity: How Residents’ Concerns Became the Flint Water Crisis, Critical Sociology 45 (4-5), pp. 583-597 [gated]. The article examines the politics of austerity, of interest to tax researchers for lots of reasons but perhaps especially for the expression it gives to the connection between tax levels and democratic preferences through the phenomenon of scalar dumping. Here is the abstract:

What might it take for politically marginalized residents to challenge cuts in public spending that threaten to harm their health and wellbeing? Specifically, how did residents of Flint, Michigan contribute to the decision of an austerity regime, which was not accountable to them, to spend millions to switch to a safe water source? Relying on evidence from key interviews and newspaper accounts, we examine the influence and limitations of residents and grassroots groups during the 18-month period between April 2014 and October 2015 when the city drew its water from the Flint River. We find that citizen complaints alone were not sufficiently able to convince city officials or national media of widespread illness caused by the water. However, their efforts resulted in partnerships with researchers whose evidence bolstered their claims, thus inspiring a large contribution from a local foundation to support the switch to a clean water source. Thus, before the crisis gained national media attention, and despite significant constraints, residents’ sustained organization—coupled with scientific evidence that credentialed local claims—motivated the return to the Detroit water system. The Flint case suggests that residents seeking redress under severe austerity conditions may require partnerships with external scientific elites.

As to scalar dumping, the paper explains that:

A central feature of neoliberal governance in the United States has been the production of austerity conditions in cities. Jamie Peck (2012) has described how urban austerity regimes emerge through processes of scalar dumping, whereby financial responsibility for public goods is passed down from national to state and local governments. The logical priority that scalar dumping sets in motion is clear: cash-strapped cities must either raise revenue through taxes, fees, or service costs for public goods or they must cut spending. Scalar dumping disproportionately strains cities like Flint, which have already suffered severely because of deindustrialization, residential abandonment, aging infrastructure, high poverty rates, and racial segregation. Thus, although a city’s municipal budget is shaped by a range of economic factors beyond the control of city leaders, financial hardships tend to be borne by residents. 

When cities fail to be self-sufficient, officials may employ legal tools such as emergency management laws to label budget shortfalls as financial “emergencies.” This characterization can provide justification for punitive intervention—including democratic curtailment coupled with cuts to public services—by higher levels of government (state, national, or international). Thus, austerity is indeed a “politically imposed condition”. Additionally, by characterizing the city as experiencing a fiscal emergency, policies that entail additional public spending are removed from contention and effectively blocked from the political agenda. And by focusing on the short-term alleviation of fiscal problems, longer-term structural problems—such as the loss of revenue due to a declining tax base, decreases in state revenue sharing, and growing unemployment—are cast outside the sphere of public debate. [internal citations omitted]

The authors explain that “social action is necessary to counter the dangerous effects of austerity policies,” but note that “the possibilities for democratic influence have been severely curtailed. Additionally, as environmental regulatory rules are relaxed, 'the operating principle is that toxic chemicals are presumed innocent of harming human health unless proven guilty.'” They conclude by noting that the emergency management system that led to Flint's water crisis remains in place, and quote Clare McClintock of the Democracy Defense League that “This is a new model of governance that is dangerous and unacceptable. And it’s spreading to a town near you.”

The Virtuous and Vicious Cycles of Tax Law and Development

Last week, the World Bank released a Conference Report detailing the inaugural meeting of the platform for collaboration on tax, which took place in February 2018 under the theme of Taxation and the Sustainable Development Goals. The conference report outlines four "pathways" of connection between tax and sustainable development:

1. taxes generate the funds that finance government activities in support of the SDGs;
2. taxation affects equity and economic growth;
3. taxes influence people’s behavior and choices, with implications for health outcomes, gender equity, and the environment; and,
4. fair and equitable taxation promotes taxpayer trust in government and strengthens social contracts that underpin development.

I don't disagree with these but in my view the international tax system is pretty much in perfect conflict with the sustainable development goals because of the way it allocates profit across jurisdictions. My paper on value creation with Laurens van Apeldoorn explored this and I continue to explore it, will have a new paper soon detailing what I consider a major part of the mischief and my proposed response. As part of that paper I diagram the virtuous and vicious cycles of tax and development, as follows:

And then I diagram what turns a virtuous into a vicious cycle as follows:

Every system experiences fissures, but where there is extreme lack of development, fissures seem to dominate and perpetuate a vicious cycle instead of contributing to a virtuous one. I think these visuals generally track with the messages from the conference report but in my view the connection between tax and development goes well beyond revenue collection, so we need to think well beyond tax evasion and tax avoidance when we are thinking about how to align these broad international systems and goals.

That said, the report labels me as presenting "the most radical suggestion" at that conference. I found the video online and excerpted my part; what I said doesn't sound all that radical to me, one year later:

More on this to come soon.

More Info + Better Analytics = Less Tax Evasion: Guest Post by Gaute Solheim

There is little doubt that information is key to effective taxation, and that modern data collection systems are making tax administrators' (and in some ways, honest taxpayers') lives much easier.  I am personally wary of governments (or anyone) amassing all of the data gathering and analytic tools they might like, because I am concerned that life in the panopticon will not be tolerable for lots of reasons. My tolerance for leakage in taxpayer compliance to forestall the complete surveillance of all human activity by government may be higher or lower than others; I am not sure. But the following guest post by Gaute Solheim of the Norwegian Tax Administration gives a nice summary of the tax administrator's more optimistic view. Cross posted from the Surly Subgroup.

Do You Really Need More Information?

By Gaute Solheim, Senior Tax Advisor, Norwegian Tax Administration 

(Mr. Solheim writes in his individual capacity and does not purport to represent the views of the Norwegian Tax Administration.)

In a previous post, I explained with reference to the Cui 2017 paper on Third Party Information Reporting (TPIR) why I expect good quality TPIR, based on a primitive analysis of the human factor in corporate filings. When I started rereading Cui’s paper, I only read a few lines before a chapter heading from the CIA textbook “The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis” popped into my mind: Do you really need more information? That book contains a full chapter (starting on page 51) on how more information sometimes contributed nothing to the quality of the analysis, but was of immense help for the confidence of the analyst.

I will below make my argument for why the answer should be “yes” when it concerns the TPIR data mentioned by Cui in the paper, but it is a qualified yes. TPIR is a bit like cooking. Fantastic raw materials will not end up as gourmet meals on their own. You need a talented and skilled chef and a kitchen with the right tools, as well.

Having spent some time on capacity-building with less developed tax administrations than the Norwegian, I agree with Cui that establishing a TPIR machinery should not be the first priority in these countries. However, TPIR being the wrong starting point for some developing countries is not an argument for abstaining from it in Norway and other jurisdictions with better-resourced administrations. I will below state my case for why I find TPIR useful based on my observations working for the Norwegian Tax Administration (NTA) (which may of course differ from the opinions of the NTA itself).

My knowledge of U.S. or Canadian use of TPIR is limited, but there is a very fascinating story told in a paper by Keith Fogg about the work of the IRS agent Joe West. It is a story starting with an audit in the late eighties continuing into the nineties and ending with the IRS getting a summons for credit card information linking US taxpayers to bank accounts in the Caribbean. That information eliminated credit cards as an easy means of taxpayer access to evaded funds.

Norway was quick to copy and paste the IRS methodology. First as specific requested information. Then, a few years later, TPIR routines were in place, giving us digitally all the credit card transactions from financial institutions. The information was used in a large audit project identifying Norwegians with undeclared financial wealth in other jurisdictions. It did not take long before it was common knowledge among taxpayers that this modus operandi did not fly anymore. The value of this TPIR as a tool to uncover hidden wealth and income in foreign jurisdictions diminished quickly, as measured in volume of reassessments.

Warning: Do not use for tax evasion

Collection of TPIR is not without costs, and after some years, the extra revenue from reassessments probably did not cover the total cost of the collection of this dataset. One could then conclude that this was a big heap of worthless gigabytes. To me that would be flawed logic, like concluding that a fence is pointless if you never find anyone on the wrong side of it. TPIR done right is to a large extent automated audits. Taxpayers knowing that they will be selected for audit on specific issues are inclined to stay compliant or shift to another, more cumbersome, modus operandi like diamonds in a toothpaste tube (see here and here). The toothpaste modus operandi had a shorter life span than the credit card scheme, and then we got FATCA and CRS.

Calculating the value of TPIR as a mental fence keeping more taxpayers inside the compliance triangle would be a hard nut to crack. I will not even try, but I would be surprised if it was insignificant. The story starting with IRS agent Joe West auditing Dorchester Industries and owner Frank Wheaton Jr. in the eighties, and ending in Norway with a lot of TPIR data with few reassessments illustrates a life cycle. It started with tax authorities going out and collecting specific third-party information needed for cracking cases with serious tax evasion; it was later streamlined as part of the TPIR system; and it ended up as mental fences for tax compliance. Today, that specific TPIR has other analytical uses for the NTA as well.

Almost all the numbers needed for producing a correct tax return for the majority of personal taxpayers in Norway already exist digitally on some third party computer somewhere. The number of sources is much smaller than the number of taxpayers. Having a system of distributing digital numbers from a small number of sources to everyone, having everyone manually punch the same numbers into different kinds of software on their home computers, and then collect all these numbers—with all their typing mistakes—does not make sense to me. It did not make sense in 2010, either. For most Norwegian taxpayers, it has not made sense the last two decades.

The main use of TPIR in Norway today is to prepopulate individuals’ tax returns, which are then made available for the taxpayer for correction and amendments. All of this ensures that we may handle millions of tax returns untouched by humans, including auditing every single entry in most of them. The NTA can do this by relying on recycling of existing data established by the business sector as part of its recording of business transactions. Businesses do it on computers with software designed to handle these exchanges of information. It means that, as a taxpayer, I may go skiing this weekend instead of sitting indoors punching numbers into some tax program on a sunny winter weekend. I love it both as a taxpayer and from nine to five as a tax auditor.

A new deduction wanted by the Norwegian government illustrates why TPIR is the way to go. The government wants personal expenses for toll roads to be deductible from income. There is a logic behind that, but that’s not my focus. The public toll roads are 100% digital and all payments are linked to an identified person. To avoid double deductions, the gross toll road payment must be reduced by the amount each individual has reclaimed from his employer or deducted as business expenses. A large part of these toll payments sits as digital information on the servers of the employers.

The NTA’s way of thinking is that TPIR is our friend. The payments on cars registered to non-business people may be reported as TPIR from a few toll road operators. The correction for reclaimed or already deducted payments may be one more item in the existing TPIR filing from employers on each employee. We do not know at this stage what percentage of all the tax returns we may prepopulate with the correct deduction by using TPIR, but we are aiming very high. Designing the compliance program for this deduction without TPIR is not a tempting alternative.

Establishing the infrastructure needed for TPIR of a specific set of data is the main cost. The exchange itself is comparably very low cost if the software doing the job is well designed and integrated in the data systems of the reporting entities. Ask any tax manager, and they will tell you that tax auditors asking for information that the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software (which manages business processes and accounting) is already programmed to produce is a small burden compared to collecting ad hoc sets of data that the ERP is not programmed to report.

We could do targeted audits, waiting three to five years and launch an identical audit program, collecting the same dataset ad hoc, and then spend a lot of resources on sorting out all the mistakes and non-compliance uncovered by the audits. It does not make sense in 2019 to operate like this. It is much more cost efficient to do the work needed to design the software and needed infrastructure that ensures that there will be a steady flow of good quality TPIR.

Within the OECD, there is a program called SAF-T, Standard Audit File for Tax. The core of this is that businesses must run their accounting on software designed for exchange of data in a standard digital format. When this is implemented, my guess is that we will see a new drop in cost per gigabyte TPIR, and it will certainly reduce the taxpayer’s cost of handing over data in response to ad hoc requests. Portugal is at the forefront of using SAF-T, with ten years of experience, generating gigabytes of TPIR monthly on VAT transactions and much more (see here and here).

The constant expansion of what tax administrations receive as TPIR should also influence the more rational taxpayers. They now know that you never know what the next dataset will be. Would you engage in a toothpaste scheme if you knew that FATCA was two years away? What tax administration veil of ignorance will be the next to fall with the help of TPIR? It gets harder and harder for the taxpayer to rationalize away the risk of future exposure of presently hidden activity.

I will restate that TPIR is a superb ingredient in the hands of a skilled chef in a well-equipped kitchen, but add that you really need a close partnership with your suppliers to make it happen without prohibitive costs.

Yes, we really need more information.

Dagan on International Tax and Global Justice

Tsilly Dagan recently posted this new paper on the limitations of normative tax analysis that constrains itself to the state. Here is the abstract:

Inequality, as well as the scope of the duty of justice to reduce it, has always been a central concern of political justice. Income taxation has been seen as a key tool for redistribution and the state was the arena for discussions of justice. Globalization and the tax competition it fosters among states change the context for the discussion of distributive justice. Given the state’s fading coercive power in taxation and the decreasing power of its citizenry to co-author its collective will due to global competition, we can no longer assume that justice can be realized within the parameters of the state. 

International tax policy in an effort to retain justice often opts for cooperation as a vehicle to support distributive justice. But cooperation among states is more than a way for them to promote their aims through bargaining. Rather, it is a way for states to regain legitimacy by sustaining their very ability to ensure the collective action of their citizens and to treat them with equal respect and concern. The traditional discussion in international taxation seems to endorse a statist position — implicitly assuming that when states bargain for a multilateral deal, justice is completely mediated by the agreement of the states. 

In contrast, this Article argues that such a multilateral regime intended to provide the state with fundamental legitimacy requires independent justification. Contrary to the conventional statist position, I maintain that cooperating states have a duty to ensure that the constituents of all cooperating states are not treated unjustly because of the agreement. I argue that not only cosmopolitanism but political justice too requires that a justiciable cooperative regime must improve (or at least not worsen) the welfare of the least well-off citizens in all cooperating states. I explain that cooperation alone is no guarantee of improved welfare and that certain transfer payments between rich and poor countries might be required to ensure this.

 This is an important and provocative paper, highly recommended reading.

Heyka on Tax Treaty Arbitration and A World Tax Court

Last fall I via twitter I shouted out two of my students who won the Tax Analysts Student Writing Competition, in the international category:

Very proud that two of my students @LAWMcGill won this year: @montano_cabezas (2015) and @Heyka14 (2017) https://t.co/XjWV2A66Cj

— Allison Christians (@taxpolblog) July 11, 2016

I posted about the first paper long ago but I inadvertently neglected to post the second.  Correcting that oversight, here it is, available at Tax Analysts: A World Tax Court: The Solution to Tax Treaty Arbitration, by Jake Heyka. Here is the brief abstract by TA:

Jake Heyka examines tax treaty arbitration standards while demonstrating that as a matter of fundamental justice, arbitration should be revamped. He proposes the creation of a world tax court.

Heyka begins by observing that "[t]he institution of international tax treaty arbitration (ITTA) is hotly debated in international business and tax law. While the process is helpful because it pressures governments to resolve contested tax decisions, opponents have called it 'secret and evil.'"
He then makes the provocative observation that "the use of ITTA ultimately frustrates the resolution of tax disputes and should be supplanted by a world tax court." In support of his proposal, Heyka lays out the history and critique of tax treaty arbitration (including by me) and concludes:

Standardizing ITTA will create some procedural certainty but does not guarantee consistent use of those procedures, allow the public to see whether the process is fair, or establish reliable precedent. As Lindencrona and Mattson suggested over 30 years ago, ITTA should be a stepping stone to what the world ultimately needs: a world tax court.

As radical as it may seem, the idea is not far-fetched. World courts exist in many commercial and noncommercial contexts, and those that deal with money rather than crime are followed by many countries and used quite often. Moreover, state authority is regularly ceded to resolve disputes between commercial parties in arbitration courts such as the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, the London Court of International Arbitration, and many other arbitration institutes. A world tax court would merely serve as a place to resolve tax disputes in a similar manner while sustaining the public nature of tax law.

While I am late to post it, Heyka's article remains timely as the inclusion of arbitration in the recently released MLI is sure to keep the issue front and center in international tax discourse. Congrats Jake, and sorry for the delay in posting your accomplishment.

Canada "Tax Gap" Study Released

The Government of Canada has released its first study of the "tax gap," which the Government defines as "the difference between the tax that would be paid if all obligations were fully met in all instances, and the tax actually paid and collected." The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) has not completed a study of the income tax, but has released this paper on the concept and methodology. It has presented a report for GST/HST (Canada's VAT), estimating the tax gap to average about 5.6% per year over the period 2000-2014. For 2014, this produced an estimated tax gap of about $4.9 billion:

This study has been undertaken after many calls from academics and nongovernment organizations, including Canadians for Tax Fairness, which according to the CRA will be involved in consultations regarding the ongoing study. Canadians for Tax Fairness estimate that Canada loses $7.8 billion in income tax revenues to "tax haven" use, a number they constructed using Statistics Canada's foreign direct investment data.

The Government acknowledges that there is no reliable method for measuring the tax gap, and that the exercise is one in speculation based on imperfect information:

There are a number of challenges facing tax administrations undertaking tax gap estimation. The key challenge is access to the comprehensive and good-quality data necessary to produce estimates. A significant proportion of the tax gap involves unreported or under-reported income and assets and economic activity that are deliberately hidden from the government. As a result, many countries that publish tax gap estimates highlight their uncertainty.

Expect more to come from this exercise as the tax gap study is a key component of the Government's pledge to spend $444 million over five years "to enhance [CRA] efforts to crack down on tax evasion and combat tax avoidance."

Tax Coop 2016: "Winning the Tax Wars" May 23-24

Tax Coop and the World Bank are hosting a conference on tax competition and cooperation to be held in Washington DC on May 23-24. As last year, I've constructed the debate, which this year will be livestreamed on May 23 at 16:15 EST.  I'll post the link when I have that information. At last year's conference, Dan Mitchell (Cato) and Richard Murphy (TJN) put corporate taxation on trial, debating the continuing viability of this tax in the face of technological innovation and economic globalization. This year's debaters are Alison Holder of ActionAid and Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

They will debate the following:

What’s Better for Developing Countries: 

Tax Competition or Tax Cooperation?

This question will be explored through a series of three resolutions, as follows:

1. First, be it resolved that: tax competition harms developing countries by reducing their capability to raise fiscal revenue to finance physical and social infrastructure needed for economic growth and social inclusion.
2. Second, be it resolved that: tax competition increases developing countries’ reliance on foreign aid, making them more vulnerable to aid volatility. 
3. Third, be it resolved that: tax competition aggravates existing income disparities between developed and developing countries.

Arguing the “affirming side” of each resolution will be Alison Holder of ActionAid. Arguing the “opposing side” of each resolution will be Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Evidence from all jurisdictions will be admissible. The emphasis will be on persuasive, clear, and logical argumentation. The debate will proceed in four rounds and will be moderated and judged by Louise Otis of McGill University and Jay Rosengard of Harvard University. Last year's debate was definitely a highlight of the conference and I look forward to hosting Ms. Holder and Ms. DeRugy for this year's event. 

The full conference program features a slate of distinguished speakers from around the world and across public, private, and academic sectors.  Registration is free; additional program and speaker information available here and you can follow @taxCoop on twitter for updates and links. 

May 4: International Tax Governance in Action at Tilburg University

Next week, I will be participating in a workshop at Tilburg University in the Netherlands on the topic of International Tax Governance, a timely topic especially given the recent developments in the coordination of the international organizations, the expansion of the OECD's global forum idea to monitor BEPS, the impact of the state aid cases within and beyond Europe, and the increasing role of NGOs in shaping international tax policy. Here is the program:

10:00- 10:30	Welcome and registration
10:30- 11:00	Opening
	Cees Peters (Tilburg University): International Tax Governance in Action
11:00- 12:30	Session 1 - Transparency
	Edwin Visser (PwC): reaction of MNC's to transparency pressure: CbCR and CSR discussion (30 minutes + 15 minutes discussion)
	Maaike van Diepen (Tax Justice Network): The perspective of an NGO (30 minutes + 15 minutes discussion)
12:30- 13:30	Lunch break
13:30- 15:00	Session 2 - EU State Aid
	Allison Christians (McGill University): a US perspective - the reaction of the US government and US MNC's
	Anna Gunn (Leiden University): an EU perspective - the reaction of the EU Member States and EU MNC's
15:00- 15:30	Break
15:30- 17:00	Session 3 - Compliance of states with new norms of international taxation
	Carla De Pietro (Tilburg University and University of Bologna): Implementation of the OECD BEPS measures (Action 6) in the light of the relationship between international and EU law.

More details and registration information are here.

Evasion, Avoidance, and Bashing Panama in a World of Aggressive Tax States

I've talked to a few journalists and commented a bit on the Panama Papers (e.g. here at 6:09 and here) but I've refrained from writing much to date because I am uneasy about a couple of central themes in this story: first, the constant confluence of tax evasion and tax avoidance, which are two completely different phenomena that require two very different responses in my view, and second the bashing of Panama as if only bad things can be done there, so anyone who does anything there from anywhere else must be doing a bad thing.

I am uneasy about this bashing because, although I think there are bad guys doing bad things in Panama, I also think there are bad guys doing bad things all over the world and I don't like Panama being singled out; I am also wary of suggesting that in a world of global trade and investment flows, anything and everything done through or with Panama must eternally be tinged with a sense of wrongdoing. This sense seems to imbue the imagination in the campaigns to "shut down the tax havens." What, exactly, does that mean? Does it mean that some countries, because someone decides they are mostly bad actors, must be effectively cut off from the global financial system and no one must be allowed to transact with or in these countries from the outside? What if most of the world are actually bad actors, each scheming to use its tax system to undermine and undercut the others? That's essentially the vision drawn by the OECD in countering BEPS, so we will run into some problems if we take this reasoning to its logical conclusion. But if this is not the idea behind shutting down tax havens, then what is envisioned, exactly?

Tax justice advocates seem to envision an invasive global regulatory regime in which every person in the world will have all of their assets and financial information catalogued and tagged and made public to everyone else, in order to make sure no one can break any tax rules. If this is being done just for tax--that is, if this is what it takes to make the income tax "work," I am not sure that the income tax is worth all of that trouble and everything given up to achieve it. That includes privacy, which appears to itself have become a suspicious word in certain circles, as if only those doing bad things have a desire to keep anything about their lives private. Let us recall Glenn Greenwald's words on why privacy should not come to be seen as a sinister desire. It is possible to break the tax law like it is possible to break any other law. But is requiring everyone to show all of their assets to everyone else in order to prove no laws have been broken a valid response to this enduring problem? I cannot agree with this Orwellian vision of the world. I also do not think this view is sensible if the issue is really driven by tax. If it is, then surely we can find a less invasive way to fund public goods and services.

This brings me to the evasion/avoidance point, which I find being abused just as much by lawmakers and policy advocates as it is by journalists who don't know any better.

Tax evasion is a crime that involves hiding things from a legal authority. Tax avoidance is not a crime that involves hiding: it is achieved in full view of the legal authorities. The former is a very very difficult problem but is not primarily a tax policy problem. Instead it is primarily a global financial system problem that is created, like most global financial system problems, by virtue of the difficulty of regulating behaviours in a world in which technology has moved us far beyond the frontiers of the nation state.

On the other hand, 'aggressive" tax avoidance (loosely speaking; more analysis here)--that is, avoidance not intentionally allowed by rules such as those to defer tax on retirement savings--is a tax policy issue. Taxpayers and their advisers are always going to cook up new schemes to get around inconvenient tax rules. Knowing this, regulators must decide whether and how to react. They may react with any number of tools that create an infinite call and response loop among regulators, taxpayers, administrators, and judges. These include such things as general and specific anti-avoidance rules, uncertain tax position disclosure, and random audit strategies. None of these things has the first thing to say about how to deal with a corrupt government official who steals money from the public fisc and invests it in US and European stocks and bonds through a maze of trusts and companies formed in other jurisdictions. It's just a totally different problem.

I know and understand that bad guys are always lurking around to defeat the tax law, as they are in any regulatory field. I don't have any special insights about how to deal with corruption and criminality. But in my experience with tax, when a government moves to "crack down" on bad guys, the really serious criminals--including government officials themselves--all too often escape while everyone else finds themselves increasingly tracked, surveilled, and treated like criminals even as the resources to cope with fixable tax policy flaws diminish. I don't have any answers for these worries.

Soft Tax Law & Multilateralism: Modifying treaties with anti-BEPS measures

As observers of global tax policy know, international tax issues are dealt with in bilateral treaties that more or less adhere to a 'model' tax treaty developed and periodically updated by the OECD (provisions in a rival UN Model are occasionally invoked, and the US has its own model with its own distinctions and idiosyncrasies). There are those who have long lamented the problem of having thousands of bilateral agreements that can't be easily or quickly updated when the OECD revises the model (thus curbing the impact of OECD soft law).

As part of the base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) initiative, the OECD is currently developing a
"Multilateral instrument on tax treaty measures to tackle BEPS" which would be used to 'modify' all existing tax treaties in force among signatory countries. The OECD says this mechanism (which it calls an 'innovative approach') 'would preserve the bilateral nature of tax treaties' even as it modified all existing bilateral treaties 'in a synchronized way'. The OECD says there are "limited precedents" for modifying bilateral treaties with a multilateral instrument.

But are there really any precedents at all? I couldn't think of any off-hand. A quick check with a few international law colleagues yielded few comparators. Tim Meyer suggested the EU harmonizing efforts on Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs) as a candidate, albeit noting that this does not contemplate directly overriding existing BITs but requires EU members to change their bilateral arrangements to conform with EU investment policy.

Tim also made the interesting observation that"treaties that reference customary international law standards, such as BITs’ reference to the minimum standard of treatment" could be overridden in a somewhat similar fashion. He explained that "[i]f custom changed, such as through the promulgation of soft law documents or multilateral treaties, it would change the BITs that incorporate the customary standard. That isn’t exactly the same thing [as the new OECD multilateral instrument], but similar."

The OECD's work in developing "global consensus" has in the past led some to describe OECD standards as "soft law" and others to suggest that the OECD may be understood to articulate customary international tax law; moreover the OECD has itself now taken to describing its model as soft law (including in its 2014 report on the multilateral instrument). I have urged caution in defining OECD proclamations as soft law or customary law given the OECD's exclusive membership of mainly rich countries, which excludes all of the BRICs and most of the rest of the world, as I think the nomenclature lends an imprimatur of legitimacy to OECD proclamations that may not be deserved. But it seems clear that the BEPS action items, and the new global forum to "monitor compliance" with them, are intended to overcome the exclusivity problem while endowing OECD norms with ever-greater law-like effect (without offending the unicorn that is "tax sovereignty").

It seems likely to me that a multilateral agreement that modifies existing tax treaties is actually intended to ultimately replace those treaties, making small and incremental modifications until the underlying bilateral treaties become superfluous or extinct. Accordingly I view the OECD's multilateral 'modification' function to be an exercise in creeping harmonization as well as "ossification" (or maybe transformation) of soft law into hard law.

Adding together the other elements of BEPS, including the new global forum to compel national compliance with 'minimum standards' as they develop, I recently suggested that the OECD's tax folks are giving birth to a new global tax order complete with rules, audits, and reform processes. This is perhaps not the order envisioned by those who have in the past called for global tax coordination in a supranational body for the sake of pursuing global tax justice. If the OECD-based regime is not fully supranational yet, it is close, and it looks increasingly inevitable once it sets a multilateral agreement in place.

There are many fascinating threads of soft law and public international law are at work in these developments. I recently came across an article by Jung-Hong Kim on the topic, entitled A New Age of Multilateralism in International Taxation?, abstract:

 With the OECD/G20 BEPS project, the current international tax landscape is facing challenges and changes unprecedented for the past several decades. This paper looks at the development of bilateralism and multilateralism in the current international tax regime, takes stock of the BEPS works and analyzes the proposed Multilateral Instrument. Then, the paper discusses the emerging multilateral tax order in international taxation. 

Historically, bilateralism has been the constant trend of tax treaties, and later multilateral tax treaties have emerged in some regional areas. There being some deficiencies with bilateral treaties such as dilapidation, delay in entry into force and vulnerability to treaty shopping, the experience of multilateral tax treaties can help build a foundation for future development of a multilateral tax treaty to complement the bilateral tax treaty network. 

With a caveat that BEPS output is fluid at this stage, drawing on the various examples of existing non-tax multilateral treaties, the Multilateral Instrument will be a desirable and feasible tool to reflect the necessary changes resulting from BEPS project. For Korea whose tax treaties need a systematic upgrade after a noticeable growth in quantity, the negotiation on the Multilateral Instrument of the BEPS project will be a great opportunity to revisit the existing bilateral tax treaties and to make appropriate amendments with bilateral treaty partners in multilateral format. 

Beyond BEPS, supposing that the work on the Multilateral Instrument results in a multilateral convention, the inevitable question is the emergence of a multilateral tax order. In terms of feasibility of such a multilateral tax order, there are both positive and negative sides. The positive side is that the relative success of Global Forum on Tax Transparency can be a guidance on the post-BEPS multilateral tax order. On the other hand, the phenomenon of diminishing multilateral trade regime and bilateral investment treaty regime seem to be a negative evidence. Another point to consider is the appropriate forum to manage the multilateral tax order. For this, there are two competing organizations, i.e., the OECD CFA and UN tax committee, each of which having some limit to be developed into an intergovernmental forum. 

After all, the essential question will be how those major players such as the U.S., EU, China, India etc. could build a consensus by compromising on the institutional and substantive aspects of the multilateral tax order. For now, for the emerging multilateral tax order to proceed on a sound basis, the work of the BEPS project should bear substantive and meaningful fruits. 

This is a useful contribution to the discussion and I would like to see more analysis on the OECD's developments, especially from the perspective of nonOECD countries that are being drawn in as BEPS Associates. I would be interested to hear from readers with thoughts on the public international law foundations and precedents, particularly any comparator regimes that I should be thinking about.

Apple's private meeting to lobby the European commissioner in state aid investigation

The FT reports that Tim Cook took it upon himself to go and visit the European commissioner Margrethe Vestager, "to lobby the EU’s antitrust chief weeks before she is set to rule on a landmark case that could force the California-based technology company to pay billions in underpaid taxes to Ireland." Really? Let's see, this is a private meeting with a person who is in charge of deciding whether your company benefited from a scheme to violate an agreement among EU members on trade practices within the internal market.

Pretty clearly the Commissioner should have flatly refused such access. I don't know what the rules are for private parties to attempt to influence a sitting Commissioner in the midst of a procedure laid out in an international treaty that directly impacts one's pecuniary interests. Apple is not a party to a case; rather it is a beneficiary of something Ireland did, and that it the action being investigated. But Apple has had a chance to make its statements and explanations according to a process. According to the EC, the formal investigation procedure accords an opportunity for input from all those that may be affected by its investigation:

The Commission is obliged to open a formal investigation under Article 108(2) TFEU where it has serious doubts about the aid's compatibility with EU State aid rules, or where it faces procedural difficulties in obtaining the necessary information. 

The decision to initiate this procedure is sent to the relevant Member State. It summarises the factual and legal bases for the investigation and includes the Commission's preliminary assessment, outlining any doubts as to the measure's compatibility with EU state aid rules. The decision is published in the EU's Official Journal, and Member States and interested third parties have one month from the date of publication to submit comments. The Member State concerned is in turn invited to comment on observations submitted by interested parties.

I have not seen comments submitted by Apple according to this procedure. It seems to me that the private meeting has an appearance of impropriety. First, it was private so it does not form part of a record of information reviewed in the course of the investigation. Neither party has given any public comment regarding what was discussed. Having a private meeting deprived Ireland of its role in responding to observations submitted by interested parties, as described above. The conversation took place for the specific purpose of influencing a decision. The conversation raises the question of whether others have also private meetings, also trying to influence the commissioner beyond the procedures laid out for investigations.

I note that "All decisions and procedural conduct of the Commission are subject to review by the General Court and ultimately by the ECJ." The Commissioner will not likely seek review of its own decision. I do not know whether other member states could seek such a review. It seems most likely that Ireland could seek a review, which it would only do if the decision was unfavorable. If that were to happen, would Tim Cook also have private meetings with the judges of the ECJ?

I should hope not.

Please Give: Passionate Plea for IRS Funding from Former IRS Commissioners

The IRS faces constant funding pressure from Congress, despite becoming a victim of constant mission creep thanks to Congressional mandates (ACA and FATCA in particular). Over the years many have pled with Congress to stop underfunding the agency. The latest comes from seven former commissioners, who note that not least among the reasons to fund the IRS is the need to spend money on cyber security as the IRS fends off one million hacking attempts each week.

That's a lot of hacking because of course the payload is enormous. FATCA has surely expanded the payload significantly by developing an enormous database of personal information attached to bank account numbers and detailed account activity on a global scale. Even a small breach of security with respect to that vault will be disastrous for the taxpayers involved.

The commissioners also suggest that the IRS workload is going to increase due to BEPS. BEPS is expected to result in more treaty-based conflicts among jurisdictions, so I expect more competent authority hours will be needed. But it's likely also the case that country-by-country reporting requirements will add another enormous treasure trove of information to the database, further increasing the payload.

At minimum, Congress has simply got to fund security for this massively expanding taxpayer information database.

November 9, 2015

The Honorable Thad Cochran

Chairman

Committee on Appropriations

United States Senate

113 Dirksen Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20510

The Honorable Harold Rogers

Chairman

U.S. House Committee on Appropriations

U.S. House of Representatives

2406 Rayburn House Office Building

Washington D.C. 20515

The Honorable Barbara A. Mikulski

Vice Chairwoman

Committee on Appropriations

United States Senate

503 Hart Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20510

The Honorable Nita M. Lowey

Ranking Member

U.S. House Committee on Appropriations

U.S. House of Representatives

2365 Rayburn House Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20515 

Subject: IRS Appropriations for Fiscal Year 2016

Dear Chairman Cochran, Vice Chairwoman Mikulski, Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Lowey: 

We are all former Commissioners of the Internal Revenue Service. Over the last fifty years we served during the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, William J. Clinton, and George W. Bush.

We are writing to express our great concern about the proposed reductions by the House and Senate in appropriations for the Internal Revenue Service for the current fiscal year that will end on September 30, 2016. We understand that the Appropriations Committees in the House and Senate have proposed to reduce the FY 2015 IRS appropriation of $10.9 billion by $838 million and $470 million, respectively, for the current fiscal year. If Congress were to reduce the IRS appropriation for the current year, it would represent yet another reduction in the IRS appropriation. The appropriations reductions for the IRS over the last five years total $1.2 billion, more than a 17% cut from the IRS appropriation for 2010. None of us ever experienced, nor are we aware of, any IRS appropriations reductions of this magnitude over such a prolonged period of time. The impact on the IRS of these reductions is that the IRS has lost approximately 15,000 full-time employees through attrition over the last five years, with more losses likely in the current fiscal year unless Congress reverses the funding trend. These staffing reductions come at a time when the IRS workforce is aging, with nearly 52% of IRS employees now over the age of 50 and 24% already eligible to retire. Three years from now, 38% of IRS employees will be eligible to retire. This loss of IRS knowledge and experience is alarming, particularly in light of the fact that, out of a present workforce of about 85,000 employees, the IRS has only about 3,400 employees under the age of 30 and only 384 employees under the age of 25 due to hiring freezes for budgetary reasons at the IRS since 2010 and periodically from 2005 to 2010. Over the last fifty years, none of us has ever witnessed anything like what has happened to the IRS appropriations over the last five years and the impact these appropriations reductions are having on our tax system.

These reductions in IRS appropriations are difficult to understand in light of the fact that, at the same time these reductions have occurred, the Congress repeatedly has passed major tax legislation to substantially increase the IRS workload. Most recently the Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, two major new programs, each of which significantly expands the IRS' tax administration burdens. The IRS personnel reductions come at a time when the IRS is stretched to the breaking point to cope with tax enforcement challenges attributable to global and domestic changes that are impacting our tax system. Increasingly, the United States is facing tax challenges as the result of efforts that are taking place in the international tax arena to deal with the tax non-compliance that is accompanying the continued globalization of business and investment activities. The most recent tax changes to address international tax non-compliance are proposed in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Report. Regardless of one's view of these proposed changes, it is clear that the IRS will be substantially impacted by changes and challenges of other countries who adopt them.

Additionally, increasing incidents of identity theft and refund fraud are being perpetrated against our tax system by large, sophisticated organized crime syndicates around the world. These criminals seek to file false returns and claim fraudulent refunds using personal taxpayer data obtained from sources outside the IRS. At the same time, many unlicensed, unregulated return preparers are preparing and filing fraudulent tax refund returns. Every time there is an information technology hacking event in the public or private sectors in which Social Security numbers are stolen, the likelihood exists for additional identity theft and refund fraud. The growing refund fraud challenge to our tax system is especially alarming to us because of the need, which is fundamental to our tax system, for the IRS to be able to assure taxpayers who are paying their fair share of taxes that other taxpayers are doing the same thing. To emphasize the seriousness of refund fraud, the Government Accountability Office earlier this year placed identity theft and refund fraud on its list of "high risk areas" in the federal government, a sure sign to each of us that the IRS should have more, not fewer, enforcement resources to deal with this threat to the integrity of our tax system,

To place the impact on our tax system of the Congressional IRS appropriations reductions over the last five years in its proper context, Congress almost annually over the last 25 years has passed legislation that has imposed additional burdens on IRS tax collection and administration under our revenue laws. During this time, the Congress also repeatedly added more and more socio-economic incentives to the tax code and called upon the IRS to administer these new socio-economic programs, including healthcare, retirement, social welfare, education, energy, housing, and economic stimulus programs, none of which is related to the principal job of the IRS to collect revenue. At the same time, Congress passed even more legislation to pay for these tax spending programs. The result is that almost 30 years after the 1986 Tax Reform Act, our tax laws are a mess. Our tax laws have become so difficult for taxpayers to understand that 80% of all individual taxpayers now use paid consultants or software to prepare their income tax returns. Because of insufficient IRS resources in FY 2015, an average of more than 60 percent of the taxpayers who called the IRS for assistance in preparing their returns during the last filing season were unable to reach an IRS assistor, even after many taxpayers had remained on the telephone for more than 30 minutes before they were automatically cut off because of the volume of calls, which the reduced numbers of IRS assistors were unable to handle. Equally serious are the cybersecurity threats illustrated by the problem that occurred earlier this year involving unauthorized attempts to access taxpayer information using the IRS' Get Transcript online application. Separately, the IRS continues to experience about one million attempts each week to hack into its main information technology systems. Although the IRS has so far successfully thwarted these attacks and its main systems remain secure, all of this astonishes us and emphasizes to each of us that the IRS taxpayer assistance and IRS information technology resources are severely underfunded, especially when compared to the increasing cybersecurity budgets of private sector companies.

It is clear to each of us that the IRS appropriations reductions over the last five years materially and adversely affect the ability of the IRS to assist taxpayers who are trying to comply with their tax obligations, as well as the ability of the IRS to detect and deter taxpayers who have not complied with their tax obligations. Recently, we understand that the IRS estimated a direct annual revenue loss to the Federal government in tax enforcement at $6 billion last year and $8 billion this year, due to such appropriations reductions. Historically, for every dollar invested in IRS tax enforcement, the United States received $4 or more in return, and we understand that continues to be true today.

The Congressional Budget Office in its June 2015 Long-Term Budget Outlook projected future fiscal challenges to the United States because of the large and increasing size of our national debt and rising future operating deficits attributable to an aging U.S. population and rising healthcare costs. It, therefore, is imperative that our tax system in the future operate at an optimal level in order to maximize the revenues the IRS collects. For that to happen, the IRS must be able to assist taxpayers who are trying to comply with their tax obligations, and at the same time be able to enforce the tax laws against those taxpayers who have not complied with their tax obligations. In short, because of our country's fiscal and other challenges, our tax system must work and work well to collect the taxes that are owed.

Some have argued that the IRS can solve these problems by simply becoming more efficient. This argument ignores the reality that the IRS is already, by far, the most efficient tax collection agency among large countries in the world. The OECD recently released its bi-annual analysis of tax administration across the developed world and reported, based on 2013 statistics which don't reflect the most recent IRS budget cuts, that the amount the IRS spends to collect a dollar in taxes is approximately half the average amount spent by all OECD countries. Germany, France, England, Canada and Australia all spend as much as two to three times the amount the IRS does to collect a dollar of revenue.

In light of the foregoing, we fail to understand how it makes any logical sense to continue to reduce, rather than increase, the IRS budget for FY 2016 in order to optimize the IRS' ability to provide taxpayer service and to enforce the tax laws to increase revenue collections. To put it succinctly, we do not understand why anyone with present and projected debts and annual losses as large as those of the United States would refuse to pay for telephone assistance to people trying to fulfill their tax obligations, would turn their back on $8 billion annually in additional revenue, or would fail to make an investment that offers a return equal to at least four times the amount invested. For these reasons, we respectfully call upon each of you to support and work to accomplish the passage of an IRS appropriations request for FY 2016 that is substantially in excess of the appropriation for the IRS in FY 2015.

Mortimer M. Caplin (1961-64)

Sheldon S. Cohen (1965-69)

Lawrence B. Gibbs (1986-89)

Fred T. Goldberg, Jr. (1989-92)

Shirley D. Peterson (1992-93)

Margaret M. Richardson (1993-97)

Charles O. Rossotti (1997-2002)

Jinyan Li on China and BEPS

Jinyan Li of Osgoode Hall recently posted a paper of interest: China and BEPS: From Norm-Taker to Norm-Shaker. Here is the abstract:

 This article considers the implications for China of the G20/OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) initiative and the international implications of China's BEPS measures. More specifically, the article examines China's transfer pricing, anti-treaty shopping and general anti-avoidance rules. It suggests that China is transforming itself from a taker of international norms to a shaker of such norms.

Li notes that China is viewed as a victim of BEPS, that the phenomenon "highlights the unfairness in sharing the tax base between developed countries and developing countries," and that the OECD initiative is an opportunity for China to gain traction in global tax governance. From the conclusion:

China’s BEPS measures go beyond the scope of the BEPS initiative. ... China has high hopes on the outcomes of the BEPS initiative. At the same time, China appears to be realistic regarding what can be achieved at a global level. The BEPS initiative is not about redesigning the basic international tax rules and the system continues to be biased in favour of capital exporting countries (CEN), i.e. residence countries. The BEPS initiative is not designed to rethink the arm’s length principle to assign more value to productive activities and markets in both developing countries and developed countries. Instead, the BEPS initiative pursues the objective of attributing more profits to the jurisdiction where intangibles are generated, which are predominantly developed countries. 

China has a high stake in the future of the international tax system, as it is both a major recipient of foreign direct investment (FDI) and a major source of outbound FDI. The BEPS initiative marks the beginning of a process that involves China. It is uncertain if the G20 and OECD member countries will be able to agree on the recommendations of the BEPS initiative and introduce the necessary legislative changes to initiate the reforms. It is even more uncertain as to the effect of the BEPS initiative on developing countries, in spite of the efforts of the UN Subcommittee and the DWG. However, to the extent that BEPS is shaking up the international tax norm, China is surely an active norm-shaker.

Today at McGill Law: Richard Murphy on the Fair Tax Mark

The Spiegel Sohmer Tax Policy Colloquium at McGill University continues today with a presentation by Richard Murphy of Tax Research LLP and the Tax Justice Network, on the Fair Tax Mark. This event is presented in conjunction with a collaborative project between the Stikeman Chair in Taxation and the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy at McGill Law on the topic of how regulation impacts innovation.

The Fair Tax Mark is a self-regulation project that seeks to intervene in the ongoing relationship between corporations, society, and the state. Like other certifications such as Fair Trade, the Fair Tax Mark is a voluntary program intended to project an image of openness, honesty and trustworthiness in tax matters to consumers and investors. The Mark is about paying taxes, but it is also about dramatically increasing transparency about how multinationals undertake tax planning as a business strategy. This places the payment of tax and the attendant planning and scheming squarely within the realm of corporate social responsibility. The Mark suggests that demonstrating some level of compliance with NGO expectations about global tax justice is becoming a cost of doing business, thus comprising a (or contributing to an existing) social license to operate.

This year's colloquium focuses on the fundamentals of corporate tax policy by critically examining issues in national and international tax policy; more information about the colloquium here. Today's talk will take place from 14:30-17:30pm in Room 202 of New Chancellor Day Hall, 3644 Peel Ave, Montreal. Students, faculty and the McGill community in Montreal are welcome to attend.

Intergovernmental Agreements (IGAs) as Hybrid Tax Agreements

I recently published "Interpretation or Override? Introducing the Hybrid Tax Agreement." Here is the abstract:

In the effort to overcome foreign law impediments to the implementation of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), the U.S. Treasury introduced intergovernmental agreements (IGAs). IGAs are hybrid tax agreements: Treaties to most of the world, in the United States they instead constitute an executive interpretation of the underlying tax treaty. This introduces a great deal of interpretive uncertainty where the terms of IGAs and tax treaties conflict. Prompted by recent queries in the EU regarding the legal nature of the IGAs, this article explores a concrete example of the legal principles at stake by examining how the public policy rules for information sharing found in US tax treaties interact with the information exchange provisions found in the IGAs.

Further in, I explain that it is difficult to understand how as a matter of international law the IGA, as a document that purports to "interpret" the underlying tax treaty, in fact obviates some of the provisions of the treaty, but do so only for the party other than the United States. I conclude:

Process matters in law. It is what makes the rule of law function as a legitimate source of authority. It is ironic that even as the United States partners with its fellow OECD members to try to address the major challenges to international taxation posed by hybrid legal entities and hybrid financial instruments, Treasury has invented the hybrid tax agreement. Conflicts resulting from this invention are inevitable and I anticipate they will be costly. I believe that Treasury took a few shortcuts around established legal precedents on the road to implementing FATCA. I understand that this may be considered expedient in the effort to get FATCA to work. But in the long run the sacrifice renders a disservice to the rule of law. That sacrifice deserves careful reflection by all those affected.

I continue to be fascinated by the rapid developments in international taxation over the past several years, in terms of both substance and process/rule of law.

Should Corporate Tax Returns be Public?

Last year, I participated in a symposium at NYU on the topic of tax and corporate social responsibility, on a panel with the above title. The NYU Journal of Law and Business has published the symposium issue, including a transcript of the discussions. You can view the entire symposium issue here,. Below I excerpt from my contribution but the entire exchange is worth a read.

... I think the story Josh is telling is that using transparency as a means to generate the political will for corporate tax reform poses some risk, real risk, to the tax system administration. I think we'll have some discussion about how genuine that risk is and how it should be measured against other risks, like firm competitiveness and proprietary information and so on. But I'll leave that discussion aside for now to focus on the first part of the proposition, and that is that what we're trying to do with corporate tax transparency is generate the political will for reform. 

Now I should preface this by saying that I am by nature and profession a curious type of person, and I would love nothing more than to be able to pore over the 57,000 pages of some corporation's tax return ... I think if you've read some of my prior work on the subject, you will no doubt be unsurprised to hear me say let's raise the curtain and have a look. Let's call it an issue of accountability and governance, and let's keep lawmakers on their toes by letting folks at this data that lawmakers are so jealously gardening for their own reasons. We humans don't seem to have too much privacy from the government, so let's us get to the business of crowdsourcing, the monitoring of the artificial people among us. 

But I keep coming back to the problem of what are we trying to solve here. If the goal is to generate political will for change, then I'm actually not so optimistic that corporate tax return disclosures is going to get us there. Instead I think it will lead us to continue having interesting discussions about whether or not we should be taxing corporations at all, or the variation that we had earlier today, which is how to draw the line between avoidance and evasion. 

That's to say we've already been taught, even without corporate tax disclosure, to expect that most American companies, especially those with a global footprint, aren't paying much tax anywhere. The jig is already up. This is not a secret. We're not rioting in the streets about it for the most part. Sure, corporate tax disclosure will confirm what we already know, but I'm not sure if getting all the gory details is going to push the political picture that much further. Maybe it will, because we clearly have an "Overton Window" in which really taxing American corporations is not thinkable. And maybe widespread naming and shaming, or just naming, will move that window. I think it's also possible that the sheer enormity of everything that you're going to see laid bare is going to very quickly lead to resignation and more handwringing, and not so quickly to actual reform. 

But if we're already at that stage now, we already have the stories - we already know the story. If we're already there, then we don't have to wait for corporate tax disclosure, do we? We can already accept the notion that if we're going to collect more from any taxpayer, corporate or not, what we need is not more public information, but more withholding and more third-party reporting. 

So let's see if I can unpack that a bit because I know that's to say a lot. I think it's worth noting that for the vast majority of people, it is not the case that the income tax system is voluntary. And why is that not the case? It is because for that vast majority, every dollar they earn is reported to the IRS by someone else. And most of these dollars are also subject to withholding, and so you have to work some to get any of it back at the end of the year. And if you are an employee, you won't get much opportunity in terms of base erosion at all; you're basically paying a gross receipts tax. We have made wage earners easy to tax with withholding and third-party reporting. And more or less, gross basis taxation with a few exceptions. 

But corporations are different. They are really hard to tax, especially when they are crossing borders. We give them lots of opportunities to carve away their gross and get to a very small net. Withholding and third-party reporting and filing for refunds is generally not the way we get corporations to pay tax. For them, as Reuven said earlier today, the income tax system really is voluntary, and lawmakers have given them a lot of discretion. Transfer pricing is just one very prominent example of this. 

... maybe disclosure is a way to have more informed public debate about the income tax system. But if we're having that discussion, then it seems not at all clear to me why we would be limiting the conversation to publicly traded corporations at all, when we are as or more interested in Cargill or SC Johnson or your local mom and pop cash flow all-cash business as we are in Google or Apple, who have at least to tell us a few stories about their tax affairs. 

And if we have that conversation, you must admit we are limiting ourselves to corporations ... and not looking at other untold billions of dollars that go untaxed because they're not subject to reporting or withholding. 

So now we come to the punch line, and that is that it is possible that corporate tax transparency is going to throw back the curtain on one sector of society - publicly traded corporations - but the irony is these are the people, this is the very sector about whom we actually have more information about tax than any other, precisely because they already have disclosure rules. That disclosure is exactly why we already know there's a problem, and yet we have not mustered the will to solve it. 

GE has been in the news with its zero corporate tax rate for years. ... I think little is likely to change with more info ... the conclusion, I think, we will be eventually forced to draw is that we, the public, haven't really mustered the political will for reform that would lead to more taxation of American companies. And we really can't help the IRS administer or enforce the tax system. In fact, as Josh suggests, we run the risk of undermining that effort, so disclosure might not get us very far at all. 

What we're going to have to do is start figuring out ways to do a lot more withholding and a lot more third-party reporting, and we are going to have to do that for all of our taxpayers, corporate or not, publicly traded or not. Maybe some or most of us already know that. We didn't need to read the corporate tax returns to tell us that, and we won't know anything new about the corporate tax system when we get that opportunity. 

Now I hate to end with the topic of FATCA. For those of you who don't know, FATCA is a global third-party reporting and preemptory withholding regime designed to make sure Americans declare and pay their taxes on income and assets held overseas. It is not a workable system, it's a mess, but think about the design. In theory, it says the IRS could eventually, once all the kinks are worked out and everybody gets onboard, track every dollar ever paid to any American anytime, anywhere. If that's true, if that's even partially possible, we can see the problem here is not at all about capacity. It is purely a question of political will and nothing more, and it never has been. 

A parade of stories about offshore tax evaders got the U.S. to adopt FATCA. Yet a parade of stories about GE, Google, and Apple avoiding their taxes has not got the U.S. to embrace corporate taxation. 

In fact, we seem to be seeing the opposite response in the base erosion and profit shifting initiative, but that's another story altogether. I'm not convinced, therefore, that corporate tax transparency will lead to more corporate tax. However, I would still love to get my hands on GE's tax return. Thank you.