This volume provides a fascinating look at the anti-tax avoidance strategies employed by more than fifteen countries in eastern and western Europe, Canada, the Pacific Rim, Asia, Africa, and the United States. It surveys the similarities and differences in anti-avoidance regimes and contains detailed chapters for each country surveying the moral and legal dimensions of the problem. The proliferation of tax avoidance schemes in recent years signals the global dimensions of a problem presenting a serious challenge to the effective administration of tax laws. Tax avoidance involves unacceptable manipulation of the law to obtain a tax advantage. These transactions support wasteful behavior in which corporations enter into elaborate, circuitous arrangements solely to minimize tax liability. It frustrates the ability of governments to collect sufficient revenue to provide essential public goods and services. Avoidance of duly enacted provisions (or manipulation to secure tax benefits unintended by the legislature) poses a threat to the effective operation of a free society for the benefit of a small group of members who seek the privilege of shifting their tax burden onto others merely to compete in the world of commerce. In a world in which world treasuries struggle for the resources to battle terrorist threats and to secure a decent standard of living for constituents tax avoidance can bring economies close to the edge of sustainability. As tax avoidance is one of the top concerns of most nations, the importance of this work cannot be overstated.

This paper reviews the rapidly growing empirical literature on international tax avoidance by multinational corporations. It surveys evidence on main channels of corporate tax avoidance including transfer mispricing, international debt shifting, treaty shopping, tax deferral and corporate inversions. Moreover, it performs a meta analysis of the extensive literature that estimates the overall size of profit shifting. We find that the literature suggests that, on average, a 1 percentage-point lower corporate tax rate will expand before-tax income by 1 percent—an effect that is larger than reported as the consensus estimate in previous surveys and tends to be increasing over time. The literature on tax avoidance still has several unresolved puzzles and blind spots that require further research.

Although the details of tax law are literally endless—differing not only from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but also from day-to-day—structures and patterns exist across tax systems that can be understood with relative ease. This book, now in an updated new edition, focuses on these essential patterns. It provides an immensely useful introduction to the core common knowledge that any well-informed tax lawyer or policy maker should have about comparative tax law in our times. The busy reader will welcome the compact nature of this work, which is shorter than the first edition and can be read in a weekend if one skips footnotes. The authors elucidate the commonalities and differences across countries in areas including (much of the detail new to the second edition): • general anti-avoidance rules; • court decisions striking down tax laws as violating constitutional rules against retroactivity, unequal treatment of equals, confiscation, and undue vagueness; • statutory interpretation; • inflation adjustment rules and the allowance for corporate equity; • value added tax systems; • concepts such as “tax”, “capital gain”, “tax avoidance”, and “partnership”; • corporate-shareholder tax systems; • the relationship between tax and financial accounting; • taxation of investment income; • tax authorities’ ability to obtain and process information about taxpayers; and • systems of appeals from tax assessments. The information and analysis pull together valuable material which is scattered over a disparate literature, much of it not available in English. Especially considering the dynamic nature of tax law, whose rate of change exceeds that of any other field of law, the authors’ clear identification of the underlying patterns and fundamental structures that all tax systems have in common—as well as where the differences lie—guides the reader and offers resources for further research.

An inherently interdisciplinary subject, tax avoidance has attracted growing interest of scholars in many fields. No longer limited to law and accounting, research increasingly has been conducted from other perspectives, such as anthropology, business ethics, corporate social responsibility, and economic psychology. This was –recently stimulated by politicians, mass media, and the public focussing on tax avoidance after the global financial and economic crisis put a squeeze on private and public finances. New challenges were posed by changing definitions and controversies in the interpretation of tax avoidance concept, as well as a host of new rules and policies that need to be fully understood. This collection provides a comprehensive guide to students and academics on the subjects of tax avoidance from an interdisciplinary perspective, exploring the areas of accounting, law, economics, psychology, and sociology. It covers global as well as regional issues, presents a discussion of the definition, legality, morality, and psychology of tax avoidance, and provides guidance on measurement of economic effect of tax avoidance activities. With a truly international selection of authors from the UK, North America, Africa, Asia, Australasia, Middle East, and continental Europe, with well-known experts and rising stars of the field, the contributors cover the entire terrain of this important topic. The Routledge Companion to Tax Avoidance Research is a ground-breaking attempt to bring together scholarly research in tax avoidance, offering rigorous academic analysis of an important and hotly debated issue in a structured and balanced way.

This report discusses the State of the Union address, which is a communication between the President and Congress in which the chief executive reports on the current conditions of the United States and provides policy proposals for the upcoming legislative year.

Today's economic and social context demands that corporations - once seen only as private actors - owe duties to the public.

GAARS: the better insight into a country’s tax system In a post-BEPS tax world and in times of an ever-increasing need for tax revenue, policy-makers are more willing than ever to tighten or adopt General Anti-Avoidance Rules (GAARs). A GAAR is typically a broad principle-based rule trying to establish the borderline between “abuse” and “use” of a law, thereby addressing the phenomenon that as long as there have been taxes, persons have been trying to reduce their tax bills. This award-winning book compares the GAARs and judicial anti-avoidance approaches of Germany, the UK and the EU. It gives a deep insight into the predominant legal traditions of the Western World, comprehensively analyses case-law and offers unique perspectives on tax law across jurisdictions. This book reveals that there is no other feature of tax law that provides a better insight into a country’s tax system than its anti-avoidance rules. GAARs and their historical background reveal so much about judicial perspectives on taxation and legal interpretation, citizens’ tax morale, drafters’ inclinations for technical or principled drafting or legislators’ willingness to confront politically sensitive issues. Understanding the role of GAARs ultimately also reveals whether they are a suitable means to counteract tax avoidance effectively. The Book is the winner of the Wolfgang Gassner-Wissenschaftspreis 2016!