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The New World of International Tax

May 22, 2020 Shu-Yi OeiAdd a Comment

International tax law has been in the news a good deal lately, and one of the key developments widely discussed among international tax experts is the “OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on BEPS,” which aims to take on base erosion and profit shifting (i.e., “BEPS”) behaviors of multinational enterprises (“MNEs”). Ruth Mason offers a broad new view of these developments in her article, The Transformation of International Tax.

Here’s the backstory: Before the 2008 financial crisis, world leaders largely tolerated cross-border corporate tax avoidance and minimization by MNEs. The 2008 crisis, together with data leaks, hacks, and resulting parliamentary and congressional hearings, brought heightened public attention to these tax avoidance strategies. This jolted world leaders out of their longstanding inaction. In 2013, leaders of the G20 countries tasked the OECD—an international organization that in recent years has played a key role in international tax policy—with coordinating multilateral efforts to ensure that MNEs paid their fair share of taxes. The OECD accordingly created its now-famous “BEPS Action Plan” in 2013 and delivered final action recommendations in October 2015. These recommendations consisted of 15 action items that countries should undertake to confront MNE base erosion and profit shifting behaviors. In 2016, recognizing that the success of the BEPS project required the engagement of developing countries, the OECD established the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework. Through this new structure, the OECD and G20 invited developing countries to participate on an equal footing in the creation of standards to combat base erosion and profit-shifting behaviors and in the review and monitoring of OECD BEPS implementation.

The OECD/BEPS project is often discussed in highly technical terms, with tax experts focusing on the specific doctrinal and policy mechanisms by which it intends to close tax loopholes. In her new paper, Ruth Mason argues, by contrast, that these changes aren’t merely technical. Instead, she writes that the international tax regime has undergone nothing short of a transformation since 2008.

Specifically, according to Mason, the BEPS project effectuated transformation along five dimensions: (1) by increasing the number of participants in international tax policymaking to include G20 and developing countries, (2) by expanding the agenda of international tax policymaking to include more multilateralism, thereby contributing to the growing importance of the OECD in international tax policymaking, (3) by moving towards a new “full taxation” norm (as opposed to merely focusing on avoidance of double taxation and the elimination of harmful tax competition), (4) by advancing novel forms of multilateral law (such as the new “Multilateral Instrument” and fiscal fail-safes); and (5) by bringing distributional issues to the forefront of the international tax agenda. Any one of these developments would be a major shift on its own, but Mason uses her masterful expertise in international tax—both from a U.S. and EU perspective—to tie all the threads together and explain how, in combination, they represent a fundamental transformation.

Mason then pushes the analysis further. She undertakes a normative evaluation of the new transformed international tax order, noting the uncertain effects for revenue and inclusivity, possible accountability problems, and potential difficulties with the new “full taxation” norm. Most notably, Mason is concerned about potentially controversial distributive issues that may arise among nations in deciding how to allocate worldwide tax revenues. She notes the conflicting and changing interests of the U.S. and EU, the emerging role of the BRICS, and the roles being played by the OECD and EU in the diffusion of norms and outcomes as important factors that will affect the ultimate worldwide allocation of tax revenues. Ultimately, she warns that distributive considerations cannot be indefinitely postponed or swept under the rug without risking chaos, failure of the new “full taxation” norm, or derailment of the entire BEPS project.

Mason’s paper gives the tax field its most recent “big picture” work, a wide-ranging conceptualization of the state of the international tax field. Her paper should spark reams of subsequent research in light of the numerous important questions it raises. For example, obvious follow-up lines of inquiry include investigation into the role and participation of developing countries in the new international tax order, further examination of the role played by the OECD, the EU, and the G20 in the diffusion of tax norms and standards and the impacts of this on policy outcomes, and, of course, empirical research about the success or failure of the BEPS project and the ultimate distribution of worldwide tax revenues that will result. The answers to these questions are important. They not only affect the ability of revenue-strapped nations to fund welfare states and social safety nets but also carry fundamental implications for the future positions and roles of nation states in our world order.

Taxing “Takers”

Apr 29, 2020 Theodore P. Seto1 comment

In Leveling the Playing Field between Inherited Income and Income from Work through an Inheritance Tax, Lily Batchelder proposes that our current estate and gift transfer taxes be abolished and that gifts, inheritances, and bequests in excess of a lifetime exemption and various annual exclusions instead be includible for both income and payroll tax purposes. She would require constructive realization of large accrued gains on gifts and bequests and repeal of carryover basis and stepped-up basis for such gains as well. To avoid forcing the sale of family farms and businesses, she would allow heirs to defer indefinitely the resulting taxes to the extent they exceed the heirs’ liquid assets, minus a cushion of $500,000. She would also permit taxable inheritances to be spread over five years to minimize bracket shift problems. Finally, to address the avoidance problems that currently plague our transfer tax system, she proposes a series of reforms to rules governing the timing and valuation of transfers through trusts and similar devices. The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center estimates that if the lifetime exemption were $2.5 million, Batchelder’s proposal would raise $34 billion per year; if the lifetime exemption were $1 million, $92 billion per year; and if the lifetime exemption were $500,000, $140 billion per year. By comparison, our current transfer tax system raises about $16 billion per year.

Batchelder’s thorough exploration of the problem includes: extensive empirical background; critical examination of the technical, economic, and ethical issues raised; and comprehensive proposed transition and reporting rules. It is essential reading for both tax specialists interested in the relationship between income and wealth taxation and lay readers concerned about addressing increasing wealth, income, and political disparities in the United States in a manner consistent with American political values.

Over the past decade, the twin problems of income and wealth inequality have become increasingly salient (Piketty 2014). Increasing economic inequality has produced increasing political inequality. And we have recently learned that in the face of a pandemic, it may also produce significantly different health and mortality outcomes. Addressing these problems is not easy. Equality of opportunity, not of results, is most consistent with mainstream American political traditions. If someone works hard, earns a lot, and thereby becomes wealthy, Americans have been reluctant to take what she has earned as undeserved. This reluctance, together with the perceived constraints of optimal tax theory, has led to severe limits on the use of income taxation to reduce economic inequality (Kleinbard 2014).

Batchelder’s solution is to tax accessions that have not been earned—gifts, bequests, and inheritances—at the same or higher rates as income from labor. This almost completely eliminates deadweight losses from the taxation of such accessions, because the only disincentive to earning would stem from the earner’s remote concern about her heirs’ inheritance tax bill. More importantly, however, it reframes taxes on wealth transfers as taxes on recipients, not taxes on donors. In the inimitable language of the American right, heirs are “takers” not “makers.”

At its core, therefore, Batchelder’s paper is a paper on political economy. Her most important argument is that including gifts, inheritances, and bequests in income rather than subjecting them to separate “death taxes” will be more saleable. Whether this is so, only time will tell. In the meantime, however, she has given us a comprehensive, technically sound path forward.

Why New Orleans Has Shotgun Houses and Other Mysteries Solved

Mar 26, 2020 Kim BrooksAdd a Comment

Meredith Conway’s article draws titular inspiration from the 1980s Talking Heads song, “Once in a Lifetime.” It’s hard to have been alive in the 1980s and not hear the song echoing in your head while you read her article. The song opens with the lyrics, “And you might find yourself/Living in a shotgun shack.”

What is a shotgun shack?

Shotgun cottages are characteristic New Orleans structures, although the architectural design crops up in other cities (and countries, too). There is some debate about how the houses got the name “shotgun cottages.” Conway isn’t seeking to resolve that debate, so she recounts what is probably the most common narrative. The houses are narrow, usually only one room wide, and when the doors through all the rooms are opened, you can shoot a shot gun and the bullet will travel through the front door, the interior of the house, and straight out the back door.

But why do they exist at all? Here, Conway diverges from the dominant narrative (that they were designed to accommodate narrow urban lots) and offers a tax story instead: perhaps the houses were designed this way as a tax avoidance strategy. According to Conway, many jurisdictions, including the Netherlands, Charleston, Japan, and Vietnam (alongside New Orleans) imposed taxes on elements of house design that inspired architects to build “skinny houses.” She reviews these skinny house-inspiring tax policies in Part IV of the article.

But let’s back up. What’s Conway’s aim in this relatively short (for an American law review) and approachable piece? Her claim is that at least some of the architectural features we see around us are explained by tax policy.

The article proceeds in ten parts. The primary sections are designed around documenting and recording taxes that influenced building (primarily housing) design. In addition to taxes that resulted in the construction of skinny houses, Conway details efforts to tax chimneys, windows, bricks, wallpaper, and number of floors. These taxation efforts cross jurisdictions and time periods, and the taxation ideas migrate. In each case, the primary motivation of tax collectors seems to have been to find administrable proxies for wealth. Each tax policy seems to yield avoidance strategies by homeowners and builders. Many have consequences for the development (or failure) of industries. Sometimes those strategies result in architectural designs that stick even after the tax is repealed.

Conway’s work in this piece feels like an introduction to what I hope will be more work by her, or others, in this area. She’s offered us a documentary resource on tax policies that were focused explicitly on housing design (e.g. impose a tax on the number of windows). There are undoubtedly more taxes that result less directly in architectural changes.

Many of the illustrations are historic, but the article concludes by exploring the use of tax policy to encourage eco-friendly building. This also seems like an avenue for further exploration. What can we learn from early efforts by tax policy-makers to tax elements of building construction that can be carried over and improved in the contemporary context, where eco-friendly building solutions are so desperately needed? Given the challenges she identifies with earlier interactions between tax policy and architectural and industrial developments, I hope Conway writes more to help us with new approaches to the interaction of tax policy and architecture, so that we don’t have to keep singing “same as it ever was” in our heads.

How Should We Think About Wealth Tax Avoidance?

Feb 10, 2020 Kathleen DeLaney Thomas1 comment

A recently published empirical study by Diana Onu, Lynne Oats, Erich Kirchler, and Andre Julian Hartmann compares taxpayer attitudes towards acceptable tax planning, aggressive (yet legal) tax avoidance, and illegal tax evasion. While the study itself examines small business owners subject to income tax in the U.K., its implications should be of great interest to policymakers concerned about legal avoidance strategies with respect to any tax base. For example, aggressive but legal tax avoidance might be an important concern under recent wealth tax proposals in the United States.

As noted by the study’s authors, tax compliance literature has traditionally focused on the binary choice between compliance and evasion. That literature explores the various underpinnings of the decision to evade, from deterrence theory, to social norms, to attitudes that evasion is a victimless crime. But largely absent from this literature on individual taxpayers are studies of the motivations underlying aggressive, yet legal, tax avoidance strategies. In thinking about the U.S. tax system, this makes sense. Aggressive avoidance strategies are typically attributed to firms, where individual attitudes and other psychological factors are arguably less relevant. Evasion, on the other hand, is typically attributed to individual taxpayers (most often, sole proprietors), who often lack the resources to employ aggressive yet legal avoidance strategies. But if the U.S. were to adopt a wealth tax like the one proposed by Elizabeth Warren, the stakes or potential payoffs from avoidance might grow. If so, individual level avoidance strategies would presumably become much more commonplace.

So what do we know about the psychological factors that motivate legal tax avoidance, as distinct from evasion? It turns out, not much, but the study by Onu, Oats, Kirchler, and Hartmann sheds some light on this question.

In the study, 330 small business owners in the U.K. were surveyed using a 7-point Likert scale to gauge how they would respond to hypothetical scenarios involving tax minimization strategies. For example, participants were asked how likely they would be to participate in a tax scheme that uses an offshore intermediary if an accountant endorsed it as a legal method to generate significant tax savings. The responses reveal that participants differentiate three types of behavior ranging from least compliant to most compliant. The behavior types include what the authors describe as: (1) “tax planning” (saving tax in a manner intended by the law); (2) “tax avoidance” (complying with the letter of the law but not its spirit, solely for the purpose of saving tax); and (3) “tax evasion” (illegal practices like concealing income).

The study also surveyed participants on various attitudes towards taxes, including personal norms, social norms, fairness, perceptions of audits and penalties, knowledge of the tax system, and the seriousness of evasion. This allowed the authors to use a linear regression analysis to link particular attitudes to tax planning, tax avoidance, and evasion.

The study revealed some interesting distinctions. The likelihood of engaging in tax planning was linked to “the belief that the tax system is flexible and …[may] be used for tax efficiencies,” as well as having high levels of confidence in one’s knowledge about taxes.

The likelihood of engaging in tax avoidance was similarly associated with a belief that the tax system is flexible. However, tax avoidance was also linked to beliefs that the tax system is unfair and that it can be exploited for profit, and to “low personal norms of public good contribution” (i.e., low tax morale).

Tax evasion was not associated with beliefs about the tax system at all. Rather, people who indicated willingness to engage in tax evasion were those who did not perceive tax evasion to be a serious crime, and who had low tax morale.

In sum, both tax avoidance and tax evasion are associated with low tax morale but tax planning is not. Importantly, the predictors of tax avoidance and tax evasion also differ. While avoidance is associated with a belief that one is treated unfairly by the tax system, evasion is associated with a view that it’s a trivial crime.

These findings have enormous implications for tax compliance scholars and policymakers. If we extend the traditional focus of the tax compliance literature beyond evasion to include legal avoidance strategies, the importance of taxpayer beliefs becomes much more important. While perceptions of fairness, for example, appear to be relatively unimportant to the decision to over-claim business deductions (evasion), they appear to be highly relevant to the decision to adopt legal yet aggressive avoidance strategies like moving assets offshore.

This brings us back to wealth taxes. As many commentators have pointed out, a major downside of a wealth tax is the administrative cost and efficiency loss resulting from sophisticated and highly resourced individuals attempting to avoid it. Although not aimed at wealth tax compliance, the study by Onu, Oats, Kirchler, and Hartmann sheds some light on the factors that would predict such avoidance. If we think perceptions of unfairness or other negative beliefs are particularly high in the U.S., we have reason to think wealth tax avoidance may be more prevalent than income tax evasion.

Perhaps most illuminating about linking tax avoidance to taxpayer attitudes is the following point made by the authors: “Of course, capturing what is moral at any given time is difficult….[T]he definition of what is acceptable practice is socially-situated and will shift in different historical periods or social groups.” In other words, attitudes about what constitutes unacceptable tax avoidance versus appropriate tax planning are context-specific and likely to shift over time. This point is highly relevant to the current debate over wealth taxation in the U.S. Some commentators have argued that wealth taxes are feasible because, in the past century, the U.S. has taxed rich people at much higher rates than it does now, which shows that collecting more taxes from the rich is possible (i.e., won’t necessarily trigger total avoidance). While this point has merit, there is also reason to be cautious about whether our historical experience can be relied upon.

It may be that the high marginal rates throughout much of the 20th century were possible because beliefs about the tax system were much different than they are today. For example, if today’s taxpayers have low tax morale and perceive that they are being treated unfairly by the tax system, we may in fact see more legal avoidance than in years past. The study by Onu, Oats, Kirchler, and Hartmann suggests that taxpayer beliefs may be one of the most important drivers of avoidance behavior. Policymakers would be well advised, therefore, to take such beliefs into account in designing taxes and take steps to combat low tax morale and perceptions of unfairness.

Writing Books Versus Journal Articles

Jan 23, 2020 Daniel ShaviroAdd a Comment

Why write a book rather than journal articles? Insofar as we write for ourselves, it’s a function of the project. Some ideas for projects may best lend themselves to articles, but others may need to be book-length in terms of their scope. But we also write for other people, and one great thing about being an academic is that you have wide entrepreneurial choice regarding which audiences you wish to reach—be it in general, or project-by-project. There’s no right or wrong about it (well, maybe there are better and worse choices sometimes), any more than novels should all fit in a particular genre, or scientific research should restrict itself to a particular subject area or methodology. There’s also no right answer as between the aims of advancing knowledge, engaging in art for art’s sake, and attempting to improve the world—all of these enterprises have value, and of course they often overlap.

Two outstanding recent books by prominent tax economists—Kim Clausing and William Gale—show how attempting to improve the world can overlap with advancing the other goals noted above through clear, lucid, convincing explanation and analysis. For the most part, Clausing and Gale explain things that some people already know, in addition to passionately advancing viewpoints to which I am generally sympathetic, although of course not everything they say is wholly beyond debate. Both books reflect admirable project choices by scholars who have done important original research to focus on amalgamation and explanation this time around, in response to the bad place where our country is right now across multiple dimensions (not limited to current political headlines). Clausing and Gale successfully communicate an urgency that even hardcore art-for-art’s-sake devotees will respect and admire as showing the authors’ commitment to valuable public service. But the books are also very different, in ways that help to show the lack of any single formula for making signal contributions to our society and discourse as a public intellectual.

Kim Clausing’s Open combines the case for embracing free trade, immigration, and global capital flows with that for vigorously addressing inequality and protecting the vulnerable. It explains not only why protectionism is such a wrong turn—although we should keep in mind the losers from wrenching economic change—but also how markets, properly bounded, can contribute to important social goals that go beyond those associated (to some, pejoratively) merely with neoliberalism. The book ends with a sensible package of proposals (including proposals for real international tax policy reform), which, in a saner political system than we have, we would surely be evaluating.

William Gale’s Fiscal Therapy examines America’s pervasive fiscal myopia. This is not just a matter of budget deficits—or, more broadly, the long-term fiscal gap between projected outlays and revenues—or even of that plus adverse global climate change. It extends also to that sometimes overused, but always under-implemented, phrase, investing in the future, such as through better education, healthcare, and infrastructure improvement. Gale not only explores one complex problem after another with clarity and balance, but offers comprehensive solutions that ought to attract widespread sympathy and dialogue from people of good faith with a broad range of ideological preferences.

Even experts who are unusually polymathic will learn a lot from these two books. But we also owe it to our public calling to help disseminate the issues, ideas, and analyses that Clausing and Gale so skillfully analyze and elucidate. They are each to be thanked both for performing a great public service, and for doing it so engagingly and well.

Time to Banish Partnership Hybrids from Partnership Taxation?

Dec 16, 2019 Charlene D. Luke1 comment

Christine Hurt’s Partnership Lost uses the developmental history and law of corporations and “uncorporations” to examine whether a principled justification exists for the differing tax regimes for subchapter C corporations as compared to subchapter K partnerships. As her Milton-evoking title suggests, Hurt describes an early, prelapsarian partnership state, dating to the creation of the income tax. The early partnership form did not spare its owners from personal liability, did not grant them dominion over an entity with perpetual life, did not provide them with the ability to transfer ownership freely, did not permit them to rely passively on the managerial efforts of others, and did not allow them to circumvent fiduciary obligations to each other and to the partnership.

Hurt describes the modern “hybrid” partnership in comparison to this early partnership model. She sets out the developments in the uniform acts and state laws, particularly those of Delaware, that have since allowed partnership hybrids to acquire desirable corporate characteristics, such as limited liability, passive investors, and centralized management, while remaining partnerships for tax purposes. The hybrid partnership, as an “uncorporation,” can avoid certain governance and other requirements. “The backstops against managerial opportunities” applicable to corporations often do not apply. The result is that “[t]he hybrid entity is more corporation-like than the corporation.”

These developments did not occur in a void. As Hurt explains, tax partnerships have generally enjoyed an overall tax rate lower than the aggregate tax rate faced by corporations and their owners. Those steeped in entity taxation will recognize that the characteristics missing from the posited early partnership form are essentially the Kintner factors from tax law, which prior to 1997 were used to evaluate on a case-by-case basis whether a state law entity would be taxed as a subchapter K partnership or as a C corporation. Current tax law’s check-the-box regulations, which replaced the Kintner entity classification regulations, now allow virtually any unincorporated, multi-owner, domestic business to be taxed under subchapter K.

The tax arbitrage possibilities opened up by the advent of check-the-box have been written about widely, but Hurt highlights that the impact of Kintner factor repeal was not limited to the tax sphere. Hurt explains that the general partnership constrained “agency problems more effectively than the corporate structure,” and “[a]rguably, the presence of those partnership characteristics served as necessary backstops to managerial opportunism, and made other agency safeguards present in corporations unnecessary for investor-partners.” Loss of the Kintner factors meant loss of their “attempt to isolate the fundamental tension in corporate law: the separation of ownership and control.” Hurt thus provides a critique of the check-the-box regulations grounded in governance considerations that complements critiques grounded in tax policy. By gathering into one article the major developments in the tax and non-tax law of uncorporations, Hurt makes starkly clear the fig-leaf dimensions of the justifications for the check-the-box regulations.

Hurt argues that modern partnership hybrids have fallen from the early partnership form state of grace and should not enjoy the fruits of pass-through taxation. Hurt does not rule out that an integrated tax for business entities may be the better approach. But, assuming a continued division between pass-through and corporate taxation, she suggests three substantive characteristics that could provide support for offering some entities pass-through taxation. These three characteristics are (1) smaller size, including consideration of “income, revenues, or assets” and not simply the number of owners; (2) active involvement of owners, including use of the Howey test from securities law to distinguish owners who are like sole proprietors from passive investors who intend to profit “solely from the efforts of others”; and (3) the absence of owners’ ability to demand payment of investment returns through buybacks or distributions. Application of these characteristics would support allowing “active owners of small, livelihood businesses” to remain tax partnerships, but would prevent other entities and owners from accessing pass-through taxation. Elsewhere in the article, Hurt discusses differences in the contracting abilities and fiduciary obligations among entities, but stops short of discussing whether this could change which entities should be eligible for pass-through taxation.

Hurt contends that now is an opportune time to banish hybrid partnerships from pass-through taxation. Because of the reduction to the dividend tax rate (added in 2003) and to the overall corporate tax rate (added for 2018), the statutory rate differential between tax partnerships and C corporations is smaller than it has been for some time. As a result, the expulsion may be less painful. Hurt also notes that given the current similarity in tax rates among business entities, the C corporation might even be a preferred form. Hurt notes, “The ultimate question is this: If there is no tax advantage to being either a corporation or a partnership, then which form emerges the victor?” Hurt speculates that, in spite of the contractarian flexibility available to hybrid partnerships, state law corporations would be preferred because of the various transaction costs associated with subchapter K.

Hurt’s article provides an engaging overview of the co-development of subchapter K access and uncorporation law. To be sure, the breadth of coverage means that the impact on that co-development of tax-focused nuances—such as the differences between the pass-through regimes of subchapter K and subchapter S—does not receive elaboration. But the article is not aimed at critiquing the details of pass-through taxation; rather, it makes an argument grounded in business entities law. Hurt writes that in a system where “entities classified as partnerships can bear more corporate characteristics than partnership characteristics, providing those entities with tax advantages originally reserved for small, livelihood businesses seems perverse.” Hurt is persuasive in demonstrating that, having clothed themselves with the characteristics of corporations, hybrid entities should not continue to have access to pass-through taxation by mere avoidance of formal incorporation.