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Combating Fiscal Fraud and Empowering Regulators OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/12/2020, Spi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/12/2020, Spi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/12/2020, SPi Combating Fiscal Fraud and Empowering Regulators OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/12/2020, SPi OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/12/2020, SPi Combating Fiscal Fraud and Empowering Regulators Bringing Tax Money Back into the COFFERS Edited by BRIGITTE UNGER, LUCIA ROSSEL, AND JORAS FERWERDA 1 OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/12/2020, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2021 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, for commercial purposes, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution – Non Commercial – No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of this licence should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945723 ISBN 978–0–19–885472–2 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854722.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/12/2020, SPi Foreword James Alm Tax systems of nations around the world have been under relentless attacks in recent years from an array of short- and long-term forces. Short-term trends include the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and its ensuing effects on fiscal systems. Long-term forces include those unleashed mainly by changing technology, most all of which start with ‘digitization’, or the transformation of information storage into digital formats for use by computers. Computers have opened the doors to a range of methods that affect information retrieval and storage, information transmission, and information analysis. Indeed, with the integration of digitiza- tion into most all aspects of everyday life (or ‘digitalization’), there have been numerous additional technological innovations, which in their entirety have contributed to transformational changes in the practices of international business and international taxation: the growing use of electronic ‘cash’ (including crypto- currencies) and electronic commerce, the internationalization of supply chains, the explosion of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, the disclosure of massive amounts of personal information via ‘apps’, the increasing use of artificial intelligence and other ‘deep learning’ methods in the analysis of ‘big data’, and the domination of many economic sectors by large, almost monopolistic firms, driven by economies of scale and scope that often arise from technological advances. One result of all of these forces has been the increasing difficulty, if not the steady erosion, in the ability of nations to collect the taxes required to finance the modern welfare state. Tax evasion, tax avoidance, and money laundering facili- tated by digitalization have all contributed to tax base erosion of the state. These forces have not gone unnoticed or unaddressed, notably by an alphabet soup of international agreements aimed at increasing the flow of information about these practices to tax authorities, both within and across country borders. However, a systematic assessment of these many initiatives has been absent. At least until now. This book brings to bear the insights from various researchers, from various disciplines, from various institutions, and from various countries to ‘analyse the impact of the new international regulations on the scope of tax evasion, tax avoidance, and money laundering’, as stated in the Introduction. The chapters in this book represent the fruits of the EU Horizon Project, ‘Combating Fiscal Fraud and Empowering Regulators’ (COFFERS), led by Brigitte Unger. These chapters do not answer all questions on how to understand, measure, and combat fiscal fraud. However, they summarize much previous research, they contribute OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/12/2020, SPi vi new and frontier research, and they suggest promising new approaches to stem the further erosion of tax bases around the world. Indeed, I believe that a first central contribution of these chapters is the recognition that a multidisciplinary approach is essential in this work, in which the insights from economics, accounting, law, sociology psychology, political science, and public administration are combined in a systematic way. A second contribution of these chapters is the creation of such a truly interdisciplinary and cross-fertilized system of analysis, thereby creating what is termed a ‘tax ecosys- tem’ approach to combating fiscal fraud. In short, the contributions of these chapters have the potential to stimulate entirely new directions of research that combine the insights from multiple fields into a coherent and comprehensive framework. This is indeed an exciting time—if also a challenging time—to be working on ‘combating fiscal fraud and enabling regulators’. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/12/2020, SPi Preface This book is an outcome of the EU Horizon 2020 Project COFFERS, Combating Fiscal Fraud and Empowering Regulators (2016-2019). COFFERS was funded at a time of unprecedented flux in the European and international tax environment. In the context of heightened inequalities emerging form the Global Financial Crisis and the broadly adopted policy response of austerity, regulatory innovation has proceeded at pace. This innovation has aimed to reinvigorate the traction of regulation on taxable income where capital’s increasing mobility and immateri- ality were seen to be confronting and transcending tax systems designed for an earlier era. Partners in the COFFERS project were tasked with making sense of this flux and providing analysis that might inform regulatory discussions so that the outcomes of those discussions were more able to redress expanding inequalities. This book showcases this work providing a multidisciplinary intervention that tracks the impact of regulatory innovation on the scale and nature of tax evasion, tax avoidance, and money laundering. We consider the international tax envir- onment an ecosystem undergoing a period of rapid change as shocks including the financial crisis, new business forms, scandals, and novel regulatory instruments impact upon it. The ecosystem evolves as jurisdictions, tax payers, and experts react. COFFERS tracks this evolution and intervenes in it so that the tax envir- onment is a tool in lowering inequalities. We focus our analysis on Europe and five new regulations: the Automatic Exchange of Information, which requires that accounts held by foreigners are reported to authorities in the account holder’s country of residence; the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting initiative and Country by Country Reporting, which attempt to reduce the opportunity spaces in which corporations are able to limit tax payments and utilize low or no tax jurisdictions; the Legal Entity Identifier which provides a 20-digit identification code for all individual, corpor- ate, or government entities conducting financial transactions; and the Fourth and Fifth Anti-Money Laundering Directives, that criminalize tax crimes and pre- scribe that the Ultimate Beneficial Owner of an company is registered. Working from accounting, economic, political science, and legal perspectives, the analysis in this book provides an assessment of the reforms and policy recommendations that will reinforce the international tax system. Our ultimate goal is to Combat Fiscal Fraud and Empower Regulators. We show that huge amounts of money are foregone in unpaid taxes for purposes such as redressing poverty, providing education, and safeguarding the natural environment. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/12/2020, SPi viii Regulators, academics, practitioners, and civil society might use the book as a torch to shine light on the status quo in the international tax environment and the trajectory of change going forward. In addition, the collection flags the dangers posed by emerging tax loopholes provided by new business models and in the form of freeports and golden passports. Our central message is that inequality can and has to be reduced substantially, and this can be achieved through an international tax system that ends the era of secrecy, opacity, and tax havens. OUP CORRECTED AUTOPAGE PROOFS – FINAL, 18/12/2020, SPi Acknowledgements Research is often thought of as a lonely endeavour. But
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