The Internal Revenue Code is riddled with features that allow U.S. taxpayers to reduce their federal tax liability by operating through tax haven companies. Some of these provisions are historic anomalies. Others are better understood as inadvertent loopholes than considered legislative grace....

We develop a tax competition model that allows for the setting of both an origin-based and a destination-based commodity tax rate in the presence of avoidance and evasion. In the presence of evasion, jurisdictions will give cross-border shoppers tax preferential treatment, thus not fully...

The authors distributed a survey instrument to university students in Colombia, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and the United States to determine their views on the ethics of tax evasion. Participants were asked to indicate the extent of their agreement or disagreement with each...

This paper uses data collected from three surveys regarding attitudes on tax evasion to determine whether any trends can be identified. Comparisons are also made by gender, age, religious practice and marital status to determine whether attitudes toward tax evasion differ based on these categories

Tax evasion is defined as the illegal nonpayment of a tax. Various arguments have been made over the centuries to justify tax evasion. Historically, the strongest arguments to justify tax evasion have been in cases where the people perceive the tax system to be unfair, where the government is...

In 1944, Martin Crowe, a Catholic priest, wrote a doctoral dissertation titled The Moral Obligation of Paying Just Taxes. His dissertation summarized and analyzed 500 years of theological and philosophical debate on this topic, much of which took place in Latin. Since Crowe's dissertation, not...

This paper, written for a European conference on tax and corporate governance, evaluates two aspects of the U.S. legal response to corporate tax shelters: the civil penalty rules and the disclosure rules. It argues that, while the disclosure rules do not impose undue burdens, their usefulness to...

This paper analyzes the sources of heterogeneity in legal tax avoidance strategies across individuals. Three conditions are required for a taxpayer to participate in tax avoidance: incentive, access, and awareness. Using rich Swedish administrative panel data with a unique link between corporate...

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development introduced country-by-country reporting (CbCR) for multinational enterprises (MNEs) to help tax authorities combat tax-motivated income shifting. This study uses confidential tax administrative data from 2011 to 2018 to examine the...

We investigate whether U.S. multinational corporations shift income overseas to the point of recording domestic pretax earnings around zero. We label firms with near-zero domestic earnings “Small” firms, and present evidence that Small captures targeted income shifting that minimizes...