To the regular readers of this blog: you are relatively modest in number but have been enormously supportive in substance--thank you! I recently updated my website and I will be posting much more content and commentary there going forward. If you are a subscriber or regular reader of this blog and want to continue following my work, please visit the newly reorganized and updated website ..read more

A recent KPMG transfer pricing study posits fixed percentages for returns to marketing and distribution activities, a.k.a. Amounts B and C in OECD parlance. The study casts some light on the OECD's design for a new global tax allocation respecting the profits of certain digital economy firms. By extrapolating from Amounts B and C, the KPMG study helps draw a very rough estimate of what Amount A potentially looks like (granularity is impossible because, among other things, how much routine and non routine profit is attributable to factors other than Amounts A, B, and C cannot be determined in t ..read more

We are concluding the fall tax policy colloquium at McGill next week with an interdisciplinary workshop to discuss ideas around the idea of sustainability in taxation. Here is the pinfo: Designing Sustainable Tax Systems This workshop will bring together scholars and students in law, environmental management and engineering, political science, and economics to discuss what sustainability means and implies for taxation. Participants will discuss the broad idea of sustainability and its connection to consumer and investor behaviour; sustainability at the level of the firm, the society, the state ..read more

Continuing the McGill tax policy colloquium next week will be Karie Davis-Nozemack, Associate Professor of Law & Ethics at Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. Prof. Davis-Nozemack will discuss her forthcoming article with Kathryn Kisska-Schulze, which considers whether and how tax policy can support the quality of life, social justice and cohesion, diversity, democratic rights, broad participation, and social capital and individual capabilities that societies wish to sustain. The paper will be published in the Florida Tax Review and it follows Prof. Davis-Nozemack's earlier work wit ..read more

Continuing the tax policy colloquium tomorrow will be Karen Brown, Theodore Rinehart Professor of Business Law at the George Washington University Law School, whose working paper is entitled Tax Policy: A Tool to Support Sustainable Growth. The paper examines the World Bank's "Human-Centered Business Model" which was developed by Marco Nicoli in a 2017 paper entitled "The Human-Centered Business Model (HCBM): A Holistic Approach to a New Model for Doing Business." As Prof. Brown describes it, this project: details a “common set of corporate goals covering economic, social, and environmental su ..read more

Tomorrow the McGill tax policy colloquium continues with a presentation by Tarcisio Magalhaes, who will discuss our co-authored paper, forthcoming in the Canadian Tax Journal. Here is the abstract: The OECD is currently in the midst of a project intended to tackle the tax challenges arising from the digitalization of the economy. As laid out in Pillar 1 of its program of work released in May 2019, the goal seemed broadly to develop consensus on a new taxing right, to allow countries to tax multinationals even in the absence of traditional physical presence. Upon inspection, the plan seems to b ..read more

The next instalment in this fall's tax policy colloquium at McGill will feature Rebecca Kysar, who will speak about her forthcoming paper, Unraveling the Tax Treaty, today at 3pm. Here is the abstract: Coordination among nations over the taxation of international transactions rests on a network of some 2,000 bilateral double tax treaties. The double tax treaty is, in many ways, the roots of the international system of taxation. That system, however, is in upheaval in the face of globalization, technological advances, taxpayer abuse, and shifting political tides. In the academic literature, how ..read more

Having given students one-on-one tutorials on how to organize their papers so many times that I have lost count, I finally made a tutorial. This is obviously aimed at my own students but as the fall semester gets into full swing and term paper writing projects take shape, others might find it helpful as well so here it is. Enjoy: 8 minutes and only a few steps to constructing a better paper ..read more

On Monday at McGill, Eric Zolt continues the fall tax policy colloquium with a presentation of his working paper entitled Tax Treaties and Developing Countries. Here is the intro: Academics and others over the last 50 years have called for developing countries to hesitate or refrain from entering into bilateral tax treaties with developed countries. Tax treaties seek to facilitate cross-border transactions and investments by reducing tax barriers and providing greater certainty to foreign investors. But treaty provisions invariably result in countries yielding taxing rights. Since at least the ..read more

Tomorrow at McGill, Rita DeLaFeria will kick off the fall tax policy colloquium with a presentation of her work in progress entitled Tax Fraud and Selective Law Enforcement. Here is the abstract: This article presents a new conceptual framework for research into tax fraud. Informed by research approaches from across tax law, public economics, criminology, criminal justice, economics of crime, and regulatory theory, it assesses the effectiveness, and the legitimacy, of current approaches to combating tax fraud, bringing new dimensions to previously identified trends in crime control. It argues ..read more