We show that tax enforcement benefits US firms that borrow from banks. Using data on syndicated loans over the 1993-2017 period, we find that higher IRS audit probabilities exert a negative and significant effect on the cost of loans. The baseline estimates show that a one standard deviation...

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

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...

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...

Professor William Byrnes examines whether it is prudent for taxpayers to trust the governments of the 117 countries that scored a fifty or below on Transparency International's corruption index. The complete information system invoked by the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) encourages,...

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...

Corporate income tax law in OECD countries requires multinational enterprises (MNEs) to set their transfer prices according to the arm's length standard. In 1990, the US government introduced a transfer pricing penalty for cases where MNEs deviated substantially from this standard. Most OECD...

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...

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 explains the transactions, agreements and accounting that Chevron, Texaco, and the Government of Indonesia used to structure transactions that avoided billions in U.S. income taxes. Although ChevronTexaco became a merged entity on October 9, 2001, for many years Chevron and Texaco...