In a recent paper, revised and published as a blog post, I argued that tax avoidance by multinationals should be included in the official definitions of illicit financial flows (IFFs). I argue that a broad definition of IFFs is essential, since they all use the offshore tax haven and secrecy system, which indeed multinationals helped…
Recent years have witnessed an accelerating push to expand access to information on the beneficial ownership of corporate entities, in an effort to bring greater transparency to multinational corporation tax strategies; identify personal tax-evading wealth held overseas; and combat global networks of criminality and corruption. There is enormous potential for these efforts to contribute to…
This piece is available in Mongolian here. Governments of mining countries are vulnerable to investors using double tax agreements (DTAs) as a means of avoiding paying taxes. DTAs are bilateral, or multilateral agreements between countries that set out which country has the right to collect tax on different types of income. Interest expense on foreign…
In the past two decades, the debate on international taxation has changed considerably. While the system is still biased against the governments of developing countries, the politics have moved in their favour. If they are able to organise and work collectively, they have scope to make the international tax system less unfair. The system for…
Nigeria is one of the fastest-growing online nations on earth, with 91.6 million Nigerians online as of mid-2017, according to the country’s Communications Commission. But taxing this digital domain is still very much in the analogue era. Akintunde Agunbiade, Tolu Dada, Emmanuel Faith, Oreniyi Adesewa, Solomon Nzere, Ikusika Bamidele, Omotoso Feranmi, Anifowose Jadesola, Adelabu Adepeju,…
Recently, 38 African tax authorities convened in Abuja for the International Conference on Tax in Africa, organised by the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF). The group discussed ways to boost tax revenues, in particular, how to improve collection of corporate income tax. His Excellency Professor Yemi Osinbanjo, Vice President of Nigeria said in his keynote…
The increasing focus on domestic resource mobilization in developing countries means that, for researchers and policy makers, access to accurate and timely data is more important than ever. The Government Revenue Dataset (GRD) — developed by the International Centre for Tax and Development and now maintained by UNU-WIDER — remains the most complete source of…
Nations vary in their approach to transparency about taxpayers. In Norway details of everyone’s income and taxes are published in annual ‘tax lists’. In most countries the information on your tax return is considered strictly confidential to the revenue authority. In recent years countries have agreed to exchange more information amongst themselves – such as…
Last week the UN Committee of Experts on International Tax (UNTC) met at the United Nations HQ in New York, a few metres from the Security Council meetings on Syria, followed by a special session on tax of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Most of the meeting dealt with detailed technical issues, as the…
For the past twenty years, Maama Sula (let’s say) has run a small fast-food restaurant in a town called Wandegeya in Kampala, Uganda. She sources the bulk of her supplies from the women in the nearby market. Because her business is relatively well-established, she pays income taxes and Value Added Tax (VAT) to the central…
There are now a range of estimates of the global scale of tax avoidance. These include: the $600 billion annual tax loss estimated by IMF researchers Crivelli et al. (2015; 2016), which divides roughly into $400 billion of OECD losses and $200 billion elsewhere; the $100 billion annual tax losses that UNCTAD’s World Investment Report…
International tax rules for multinational companies appear to be approaching a major crossroads, for three reasons. First, the OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) process is increasingly seen as unlikely to deliver on the ambition of its one stated aim, to reduce the misalignment between multinationals’ declared, taxable profits and the location of their…
