In their famous Mirrlees review (2011) on reforming the tax system for the 21st century, the authors put forward the introduction of an allowance for corporate equity regime. In recent years, several countries introduced an ACE regime. The main feature of an ACE regime is that it removes tax...

German municipalities levy local business taxes by choosing a tax rate to apply to local business income, where the tax base is defined uniformly at the national level. Before the federal government's imposition of a minimum tax rate in 2004, some municipalities such as the tiny North Sea town...

The German law to combat VAT fraud and other tax regulations went into force recently. The German legislator aims to enforce German VAT law via a liability of platform operators (like Amazon and eBay). The consequences of this regulatory approach are a) that platform operators enforce the law...

Die Arbeiten an der Gemeinsamen konsolidierten Körperschaftsteuer-Bemessungsgrundlage GKKB gehen weiter. Allerdings dient der am 28. Januar 2016 von der Kommission veröffentlichte Richtlinienentwurf primär der Einschränkung von als unerwünscht angesehenen Steuergestaltungen. Das...

The article deals with the interesting issue of the tax treaty qualification problems arising in hybrid financial instruments and structures. The need to fit the great diversity of instruments and legal, economic and accounting trends attached to them into the closed range of treaty income...

Canadian National Report prepared for the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Conference on tax secrecy and transparency, Rust, Austria, July, 2012. The aim of the project is to assess how different countries regard the treatment of tax information and tax secrecy. Topics include the...

Using a survey of tax executives from multinational corporations, we document that some firms set their transfer pricing strategy to minimize tax payments, but more firms focus on tax compliance. We estimate that a firm focusing on minimizing taxes has a GAAP effective tax rate that is 6.6...

This article deals with the decision taken by the Court of Justice of the European Union in September 2014 regarding the compatibility of inheritance taxation with the fundamental freedoms (Commission v. Spain (Case C-127/12) and Commission v. Germany (Case C-211/13)).The authors welcome the...

This article is focused on the Court's decision in Hornbach-Baumarkt (Case C-382/16) (Hornbach) which is an important clarification of the conditional compatibility of arm's length-based domestic transfer pricing legislation with the freedom of establishment. Hornbach follows and confirms the...

Bei der Besteuerung nicht oder nur begrenzt handelbarer Dienstleistungen (wie z.B. lokale Postdienstleistungen) entfällt der Anpassungsdruck des internationalen Steuerwettbewerbs weitgehend, sodass etwaige Wettbewerbsverzerrungen insbesondere zwischen verschiedenen inländischen...