THE JAMES HAUSMAN TAX LAW & POLICY WORKSHOP
presents
Arthur Cockfield
Queen’s University Faculty of Law
What’s International Tax Law Got To Do With It?
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
The OECD and G20 Base Erosion and Profits (BEPS) project represents the greatest multilateral cooperative effort to date to inhibit aggressive international tax planning and offshore tax evasion. While accepting that cooperation is normally helpful, the Article explores some of the theoretical and practical limits to international tax cooperation along with the potential for unilateral tax reform to confront pressing challenges. First, the value of competition versus cooperation remains contested by economists and others. Second, multilateralism may distract governments from focusing on unilateral reform efforts that are better suited to tackling contemporary policy challenges. Third, it remains unclear whether cooperative solutions are curtailing perceived problems in any significant sense. Finally, global political developments, including anti-globalization, nationalism, nativism and the rise of the BRICs make progress through international cooperation even more elusive. Accordingly, in times where political developments reduce opportunities for meaningful cooperation then governments need to focus on unilateral reforms to their international tax laws and policies. To pursue optimal policy, governments should consider eliminating tax subsidies for global operations, limiting expense deductions to zero-tax jurisdictions, and ensuring that the human beneficial owners of business and legal entities can be identified for tax and law enforcement purposes.
Arthur Cockfield, HBA (Western Ivey School of Business), LL.B (Queen’s), JSM and JSD (Stanford), is a Professor at Queen’s University Faculty of Law where he was appointed as a Queen’s National Scholar. He is a senior research fellow at Monash University, and has been a Fulbright Visiting Chair in Policy Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Cockfield’s research mainly focuses on tax law, and his books include NAFTA Tax Law and Policy (Univ. of Toronto Press 2005), as editor of Globalization and Its Tax Discontents (Univ. of Toronto Press 2010) and, as co-author, Taxing Global Digital Commerce (Kluwer 2013). He is the recipient of a number of fellowships, external research grants, and awards for his research, including the Douglas J. Sherbaniuk Distinguished Writing Award. He has served as a legal consultant to organizations that include the OECD, the United Nations, the Department of Justice, the Department of Finance, the Office of the Auditor General and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
A light lunch will be served.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
