VAT at UCONN

Posted by Ruth Mason on taxprof/typepad.com:

"Rita de la Feria (Centre for Business Taxation, Oxford) presented The Pitfalls of Accepted VAT Wisdom: Lessons from the EU Experience at Connecticut as part of its Tax Lecture Series. Rather than addressing whether the United States should adopt a value-added tax, de la Feria focused on what the United States could learn from the European experience.

VAT is the world’s fastest growing tax, with 130 countries applying it in some form. De la Feria noted the irony that although the United States is the only major industrialized country without a VAT, Michigan was the first jurisdiction to apply a VAT. While de la Feria noted that the allures of VAT include simplicity, ease of assessment and collection, and effectiveness in raising revenue, she cautioned that certain aspects of the European implementation of VAT have reduced these benefits. Among other recommendations, de la Feria warned that VAT exemptions and rate differentials designed to achieve progressivity or encourage consumption of merit goods have lead to extensive tax planning and difficult line-drawing problems in Europe.

Two cases decided in the British courts illustrate her point. In Jaffa Cakes, the court had to decide whether the popular British confection was a cookie or a cake. If a cake, it would fall under the VAT exemption for food, whereas cookies were subject to the standard rate of 17.5%. With a healthy dose of humor, de la Feria described the case as well as the court’s standard of review. The court declared that the distinction between cookies and cakes could be drawn by reference to what happens when they go stale: cakes go hard; cookies go soft. In another case, relying in part on the fact that Pringles only contain 40% potato, a court found that Pringles should not be subject to the higher rate of VAT applicable to (unhealthy) “potato crisps.” De la

Feria noted the perverse effect of the Pringles ruling: the more filler in the chip, the more likely the exemption!

Brussels to close loopholes in tax evasion legislation

"Brussels to close loopholes in tax evasion legislation"
Article published by Vanessa Houlder in London and Nikki Tait in Brussels in Financial Times (www.ft.com) on November 13 2008

Brussels will today step up the pressure on international tax-dodgers when it unveils proposals for bolstering the European Union's savings tax system.

The European Commission is expected to close some of the loopholes in the savings tax directive, the EU's flagship initiative against tax evasion which came into force three years ago.

The directive originally aimed to flush out tax evaders by requiring exchange of information between countries, or withholding tax on payments in third countries, such as Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Andorra.

But critics say the omission of trusts, foundations and companies from the legislation allowed evaders to sidestep the directive's intended effect.

The Commission acknowledged coverage had been not as wide as originally anticipated after it reviewed the directive's implementation this autumn. Officials proposed technical amendments in four main areas.

They admitted that the directive had dealt only with interest payments made for the immediate profit of individuals resident in the EU - giving people an opportunity to circumvent the rules by interposing another legal person or arrangement situated in a non-EU country.

A possible solution would be to ask "paying agents" - such as banks - to use the information already available to them under anti-money-laundering rules about the ultimate beneficial owners of outgoing payments.

But the proposed changes could be controversial. The European Policy Forum, an independent think-tank, said last week that it believed extending the directive would risk an own goal because it would impose a heavy compliance burden on member states' financially vulnerable banking sectors.

A highly critical report by the EPF said the directive had not fulfilled its original goals: "Member state governments have found the exchange of information model difficult to apply with a number of countries reporting long delays, inaccurate data and a range of problems centring on pursuing reports of interest income received by taxpayers in other countries."

It warned there was "a real danger that an extended directive would simply add to banks' cost base for little net benefit". The 1,243 leading banks in the EU and Switzerland would face an additional bill of nearly €700m ($877m, £587m) from an extension of the directive, the EPF calculated. That compared with initial compliance costs of €753m, with annual compliance costs of a further €693m.

The EPF said extending the directive's scope would be time-consuming, and that it would be costly for banks to be certain whether income received from a particular financial product fell within the directive's catchment area or not.

The higher compliance costs might force banks to withdraw credit facilities to businesses and households. "Given the relatively modest amounts raised by the directive to date and the fragile status of many banks across the EU . . this would appear to be a misguided policy -initiative."

Regulating Tax Competition in Offshore Financial Centers

Regulating Tax Competition in Offshore Financial Centers

Craig M. Boise (Case Western Reserve University - School of Law) published this paper at Case Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-26

Here is the Abstract:

One of the more entrenched issues in international taxation over the last thirty years has been how to define and respond appropriately to harmful tax competition among nations, especially competition from offshore financial centers (OFCs). The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union (EU) have both mounted initiatives seeking to regulate such competition, and OFCs have strongly objected to these initiatives as an abrogation of their sovereignty in tax matters. This paper provides an introduction to the debate over the regulation of international tax competition, beginning with an overview of the essential architecture of international taxation and the way that its structure creates problems for developed countries and opportunities for OFCs, and continuing with an assessment of the arguments asserted in favor of, and against, regulating tax competition.

The paper then examines how developed countries, through the OECD and EU, have defined international tax competition, and the efforts made by both organizations to regulate such competition. Finally, the paper draws on the way the OECD and EU dealt specifically with the twin touchstones of virtually all definitions of tax havens-low or no income taxation and bank secrecy-to suggest the direction that regulation of tax competition is likely to take in the future.

Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1266329

Constitutional Restraints on Corporate Tax Integration

Walter Hellerstein (University of Georgia School of Law), Georg Kofler (NYU School of Law) and Ruth Mason (University of Connecticut School of Law) published the report Tax Law Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN:http://ssrn.com/abstract=1101560

Here is the Abstract:

States that conclude that double taxation of corporate profits unacceptably distorts the choice of business form, the debt and equity capitalization of companies, and the character and timing of profits distributions may adopt integrated corporate tax regimes, but states almost always limit such re gimes to domestic dividends¿those paid by a corporation taxable in the state to a shareholder also taxable in the state. In contrast, states generally deny double tax relief to cross-border dividends. Failure to extend relief to cross-border dividends distorts locational investment decisions.

Although restricting double tax relief to domestic dividends does not violate international tax nondiscrimination rules, more stringent nondiscrimination rules govern state taxation in the European Union and the United States. Member states of those common markets may not constitutionally prefer domestic commerce over cross-border commerce, and that constitutional constraint limits EU and U.S. states' ability to confine double tax relief to domestic dividends. This symposium paper establishes the basic framework for taxation of cross-border dividends, closely analyzes and compares constitutional challenges to states' failure to extend double tax relief to cross-border dividends in Europe and the United States, and identifies the principal policy considerations emerging from the nascent cross-border dividend jurisprudence in the European Court of Justice.

Corporate tax cut in UK has little impact, but low VAT raises reputation

Rate cut has little impact on global ranking
Article published by Vanessa Houlder in Financial Times (www.ft.com) on September 8 2008.

This year’s cut in the corporate tax rate has failed to push the UK decisively up the international rankings, according to a new survey that shows Britain’s efforts to improve its tax competitiveness have been blunted by similar efforts elsewhere.

The UK now has the 20th lowest corporate tax rate of the 27 European Union member states, a slight improvement for businesses on last year’s 21st position, according to the survey by KPMG, professional services firm.

The UK’s struggle to close the gap with smaller European competitors is likely to fuel criticism from businesses and opposition politicians.

KPMG said: “This continued downward pressure on worldwide and European corporate tax rates will add to the pressure on the UK authorities to address the UK’s perceived lack of competitiveness on tax.”

The impact of April’s 2 percentage point cut to 28 per cent was tempered by cuts elsewhere, which pushed average global and European corporate tax rates down by 1 percentage point. The UK’s corporate tax rate remains higher than the global average of 25.9 per cent and the EU average rate of 23.2 per cent.

But the UK is facing tough competition for holding companies from smaller low-tax European rivals, particularly Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland and the Netherlands, as demonstrated by recent moves out of the UK announced by Shire, UBM, Henderson, Charter and Regus.

These moves recently sparked an angry exchange between Alistair Darling and George Osborne, shadow chancellor, who called for a cut in the rate to 25 per cent which “would go some way towards undoing the damage the government has done by failing to keep pace with European tax rates”.

Mr Darling rejected Mr Osborne’s criticisms of the competitiveness of the business tax system as “wrong”.

Chris Morgan, head of international corporate tax at KPMG, said the relocation of headquarters was not driven by concern about the tax rate although bringing down tax rates was an important long-term objective. The argument was instead focused on the question of whether foreign profits should be taxed in the UK, he said.

The intensity of international tax competition was underlined by the finding that – for the first time since 1994 – no country in the 106-strong sample had raised rates. Competition has been particularly intense in the EU over the past 10 years, moving average corporate tax rates from the highest to the lowest of any group of countries in the OECD.

The relationship between tax rates and overall competitiveness is complex, with many other factors including political stability, infrastructure, access to new markets and a skilled labour force playing an important role. Sue Bonney, KPMG’s head of tax said: “Undoubtedly, the corporate tax rate is an important factor for businesses but it is far from the only factor.”

Big industrialised countries such as the UK typically have much higher rates than small countries. Countries such as Malta, Luxembourg and Switzerland have far lower effective rates than their headline rates as a result of exemptions and special rulings.

In May, Mr Darling acknowledged the challenge facing the tax regime, saying “Business does have a choice. Business is increasingly mobile. Tax rates have to be globally competitive.”

The UK’s corporate rate cut ensured that it continued to have a lower rate than Germany at 29.5 per cent, preserving the Treasury’s goal of having the lowest rate in the G7.

Low VAT raises reputation

Britain has the fourth lowest rate of value added tax in the EU, according to KPMG which said this relatively low rate underpinned the business-friendly reputation of the indirect tax system .

Britain’s 17.5 per cent VAT rate is well below the average in the EU of 19.49 per cent, in contrast to its position on corporate taxes. KPMG said this was in line with the “generally accepted idea” that indirect taxes compensate for reduced corporate tax yields.

This notion was partly supported by the contrast between the EU’s low corporate tax rates and its high VAT rates. Against a global average indirect tax rate of 15.7 per cent, the EU’s average rate was 19.49 per cent.

The UK’s relatively low rate, together with its stability over recent years, helped secure the UK top position in a KPMG survey of the best countries in the world to deal with from an indirect tax perspective.

The survey found that indirect tax rates have remained relatively stable, in contrast to the declines in corporate tax rates. KPMG said if indirect tax yields were compensating for declining corporate tax yields, this was being achieved by widening the indirect tax base and applying rules more strictly.

Mason on Tax Discrimination in the EU

Proffessor Ruth Mason (UConn) has published an interesting report entitled In Search of Internal Consistency: Tax Discrimination in the EU, 46 Colum. J. Trans. L ___ (2007), on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The European Union was created to bind the countries of Europe together economically to prevent future wars. Rigorous enforcement of EU nationals' fundamental economic freedoms before the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has furthered economic integration. The fundamental freedoms prohibit tax discrimination—harsher tax treatment of cross-border economic activities than purely internal activities. Critics of the ECJ argue that the Court's broad interpretation of the EC freedoms causes it to find tax discrimination where there is none. This tendency encroaches upon the sovereignty of EU member states and hampers their ability to pursue economic policy goals. In contrast, based upon a survey of all the ECJ's tax discrimination decisions, this Article offers a more nuanced critique that shows the ECJ's errors in tax discrimination cases go in both directions. In addition to finding discrimination where there is none, the Court also sometimes fails to recognize discrimination. The Court's failure to recognize tax discrimination undermines the economic integration of Europe and abridges EU nationals' personal rights.

This Article is the first to identify the Court's method of review in tax discrimination cases, the comparable internal situation test (CIST), as a principal contributor to the Court's difficulty in tax cases. Instead of CIST, the Article proposes that the ECJ borrow a method developed by the U.S. Supreme Court for tax cases arising under the Commerce Clause: the internal consistency test (ICT). Adoption of this simpler method should enable the ECJ to make more coherent tax decisions, which will promote economic efficiency and integration of the European common market.

Lecture on VAT in the European Union

Here are the lecture by Prof. Dr. Michael Tumpel, made April 11, 2007.

Listen to Prof. Tumpel's Lecture:

Introduction:
Download the MP3

Lecture:
Download the MP3

Q & A:
Download the MP3

Reaganomics at 25

Well deserved to view editorial in the Weekend Wall Street Journal, entitled Reaganomics at 25:

Twenty-five years ago this weekend, Ronald Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act. The bill cut personal income tax rates by 25% across the board, indexed tax brackets for inflation and reduced the corporate income tax rate. The anniversary is worth commemorating as a seminal moment that continues to influence policy for the better in the U.S., and around the globe....

[T]he top marginal personal and corporate tax rates are 35%, compared with 70% and 48% in 1981. In the late 1970s the tax on dividends was 70% and the capital gains rate was 50%; now they're both 15%....

The rest of the world, meanwhile, has followed the Gipper down the tax-cut curve. Daniel Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation finds that the average personal income tax rate in the industrialized world is now 43%, versus 67% in 1980. The average top corporate tax rate has fallen to 29% from 48%. This decline in global tax rates has been the economic counterpart to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Most of Eastern Europe has adopted flat tax rates of 25% or lower, and the Russians now have a flat income tax of 13%. In Old Europe, Ireland's corporate and personal income tax rate cuts have helped generate the swiftest economic growth in the EU.

International VAT/GST Guidelines

Interesting Guidelines by the OCDE: http://www.law.uconn.edu/news/events/itax/vat.pdf

The world (Tax) is Flat

There is an interesting editorial in the Wall Street Journal, The World is Flat:

"Sooner or later it had to happen: The mainstream press is finally discovering the flat-tax movement that has been sweeping Europe. It must be painful to credit an idea associated with the likes of Milton Friedman and Steve Forbes, but reality can't be ignored forever.

The latest news is that the government of Greece is contemplating a 25% flat-rate income tax to take effect in 2006, replacing a multiple-tier tax structure with rates of 40% or more. The Finance Minister insists that such a flat-tax reform is necessary to reduce a spiraling budget deficit, and that any lost revenue will be recouped "via an overall increase in income."

By our count, this brings to 11 the number of nations with a single-rate, postcard tax system. More dominoes are expected to fall in the next few years: Bulgaria, Croatia and Hungary are also preparing to feed their thousands of pages of tax code into the shredder in favor of lower, flatter rates. A flat-tax proposal was debated as part of Poland's recent election campaign. And one of the countries that started it all, Estonia, plans to lower its rate one more time, to 20% from 24%, which was down from the initial flat rate of 26%. Lithuania hopes to go to 24% from 33%.

As shown in the nearby table, most of the world's flat-tax nations today are the former Iron Curtain nations, which for 50 years attempted to create a workers' paradise through command-and-control economic systems. Many of these nations have swung full circle in the opposite, free-enterprise direction. Daniel Mitchell, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, notes that Greece's decision would make it the first non-former communist European nation to adopt the flat tax. East Europe is exporting its economic system westward after all, but not in the way Nikita Khrushchev ever could have imagined.

In response, even Old Europe has had to consider tax reform, lest its economies become increasingly uncompetitive. Rather than catching the flat-tax wave, France, Germany and Italy have been attempting to stop it by outlawing tax competition through international entities, such as the OECD, the European Union and United Nations.

But in the meantime, Germany has decided it can't wait and has announced plans to cut its corporate tax rate to 19% from 25%. During last month's election campaign, the opposition party's candidate for finance minister, Paul Kirchhof, championed a 25% flat tax "so that workers don't need 12 Saturdays but 10 minutes to complete their taxes." Some analysts blame the proposal for the opposition's late collapse in the polls, as incumbent Gerhard Schröder's party fanned fears about the flat tax. But the fact that it was debated at all shows that even Germans realize they are under competitive tax pressure.

And what of the United States? The postcard flat-tax concept was virtually invented on these shores, originally by Mr. Friedman. Americans devised the economically optimal tax system and much of the world seems ready to embrace it -- just not us.

Back in the 1980s, a few Democrats (Bill Bradley, Dick Gephardt) entertained a tax reform of flatter rates and fewer deductions. But nowadays the political left derides the concept as some sinister plot to let Rolls Royce and yacht owners slash their tax bills. Their ideological blinders prevent them from learning the lesson that the new political class in Russia, Estonia and now Greece accept as a 21st-century economic reality: The best way to get more taxes out of rich people is to generate more rich people, and then give them more incentive to report their income by keeping tax rates low.

Russia, for example, has reported that it now gets more tax revenues from the rich from its 13% flat tax than from its pre-existing Swiss cheese tax code with massive evasion and 50%-plus tax rates. Russia's revenues with the flat tax grew in real terms by 28% in 2001, 21% in 2002, and 31% in 2003, according to a recent analysis by the Hoover Institution. If the U.S. had that kind of revenue growth, our politicians would be wringing their hands over what to do with budget surpluses.

Last year the Internal Revenue code achieved a new Olympic record for complexity, with nine million words -- 12 times the length of the King James Bible. High tax rates and mindless tax complexity are an economic ball and chain. We hope President Bush's tax reform commission will cut through the class-warfare blather later this month and endorse a simple, broad-based, single-rate tax system."

The WSJ published a table showing the flat tax rates in these eleven countries. I have added below the 2004 GDP growth rates in these countries, which usually exceeds the worldwide growth rate of major industrialized countries:

Flat Tax Rates and GDP Growth Rates
Country Flat Tax Rate GDP Growth Rate
Estonia 24% 4.8%
Georgia 12% 5.5%
Greece 25% 4.0%
Hong Kong 16% 2.9%
Latvia 25% 6.8%
Lithuania 33% 7.1%
Romania 16% 4.5%
Russia 13% 7.3%
Serbia 14% 2.0%
Slovakia 19% 3.9%
Ukraine 13% 8.2%
October 8, 2005 in News | Permalink

Lowering the Taxation Learning Curve: the Case of Latvia

Lesica, George. "Lowering the Taxation Learning Curve in Transition Economies: the Case of Latvia" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the The Midwest Political Science Association, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois, Apr 15, 2004

Abstract: After Latvia achieved independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 its government faced the monumental task of overhauling not only an antiquated political system
but an obsolete economic system as well. Part of reforming the economic
system meant instituting a tax policy that was friendly to and
compatible with private enterprise. This task was accomplished based
primarily on Western European standards and values. A social welfare
system was put in place and taxes were set to reflect expenditures of
the government keeping in mind the balanced budget demands of the
European Union and International Monetary Fund. Despite the adoption of
Western European practices, tax evasion and the so-called shadow
economy remained far more prevalent than in the West due to the use of
so-called envelope payments. This situation in Latvia and other
developing economies stifled growth and government services and made a
balanced budget extremely difficult and somewhat painful.

When tax rates are too high companies understand that they cannot
afford to do business if they are forced to pay all taxes associated
with their activities. This leads them to use the system of envelope
payments and other means to avoid taxes on certain transactions in
order to bring their tax burdens under control. This creates a
sub-optimal equilibrium as firms cannot abandon the practice of evasion
as long as their competitors do not, even if they can economically
afford to do so.

Lower tax rates, whether in the form of VAT, income, or other taxes
could serve as an economic incentive for companies to forgo offering or
accepting envelope payments by making the costs of evasion higher than
the costs of paying taxes. This would serve to increase the percentage
of transactions that are taxed and would allow time for both economic
and social factors to take hold and make tax-paying an accepted part of
life.

In this paper I argue that tax evasion in transition economies can be
reduced by instituting lower tax rates initially and scheduling
increases based on the rate of decrease in the country’s shadow economy
as measured by the International Monetary Fund. I accomplish this by
developing a formula for calculating a tax level at which an economic
incentive can be created to establish a tax-paying equilibrium. My
formula makes use of economic indicators combined with tax levels,
levels of government spending and IMF data on shadow
economics.