This document contains four installments of "The Big Picture," a column published in Tax Analysts, International Tax Notes, Volumes 66-68 (2012). The first installment, "Putting Arbitration on the MAP: Thoughts on the New U.N. Model Tax Convention," discusses the addition of mandatory...

A recent KPMG transfer pricing study posits fixed percentages for returns to marketing and distribution activities, a.k.a. Amounts B and C in OECD parlance. The study casts some light on the OECD's design for a new global tax allocation respecting the profits of certain digital economy firms. By...

Why do countries follow the rules they do for international taxation? Tax scholarship is increasingly using terms like hard law and soft law to explain the degree of global adherence to various tax practices. In this brief essay, I make the case that terms we use are important because they...

Apple recently disclosed to shareholders a potentially material impairment to its earnings: an ongoing investigation by the European Commission into Ireland's tax ruling practices. Ireland may be forced to retroactively impose additional taxes on Apple, going back as much as a decade (and...

The IRS recently announced that its mandatory registration regime for paid tax return preparers, struck down in the Loving decision, would henceforth be offered as a voluntary program. But the authors of this program appear to have forgotten that the US system is perfectly global in reach,...

This chapter for a forthcoming text on investment promotion explains the concept of “luring with tax”. It first lays out in broad strokes how nation states compete with each other for direct and portfolio investment using their tax systems. It then analyzes whether using the tax system as an...

Many countries seek to attract wealthy individuals — their capital, if not actually themselves — with programs that confer residence or citizenship in exchange for specified investments in local property or business ventures. Some programs simply facilitate jumping the immigration line,...

The United States enacted a tax reform in 2010 known as the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which will impose an extensive third-party monitoring and disclosure regime on financial institutions around the world in an effort to “smoke out” American tax cheats and expose their...

When Congress enacted the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act in 2010, it made no mention of any internationally-agreed alternative to its enforcement, and Congress has made no authorization since then for the president to override FATCA's statutory provisions by international agreement. Yet due...

Conventional wisdom explains tax competition as an external constraint on lawmaking that can only be curbed through multinational cooperative efforts to eliminate beggar-thy-neighbor tax policies. But the international tax reform plan recently introduced by Senator Baucus squarely confronts this...