For a government's fiscal program to best serve the public interest, while also ensuring sufficient public revenue collection, it has to meet three criteria: efficiency, simplicity and fairness. Unfortunately, the royalty and tax system currently in place for Saskatchewan's robust potash-mining...

Welfare economics, scope and performance of government, externalities, public goods, cost-benefit analysis, subsidies economize on spending without losing effectiveness by modifying the conceptual framework guiding state expenditures. The familiar framework says that state intervention is...

The world is awash in trade-distorting subsidies. Since the financial crisis of 2008, governments have adopted massive “stimulus” packages that have included taxpayer subsidies for industries, such as agriculture, alternative energy, and automobiles, which have distorted global markets, bred...

This paper aims to provide an overview of the current state of taxation in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, and its main reform needs and options. It previews the findings of recent studies prepared or commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) for its forthcoming...

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...

This paper considers some economic factors behind the optimal valuation and pricing of annual licenses, practicing certificates and memberships for professionals such as: lawyers and attorneys, doctors, dentists and nurses, architects and engineers, accountants, actuaries, licensed financial...

Many people — perhaps most — want to make money and lower their taxes, but few want to unabashedly break the law. These twin desires have led to a range of strategies, such as the use of “paper corporations” and offshore tax havens, that produce sizable profits with minimal costs. The...

As most of us are aware, the failure to comply with the tax law can lead to tax penalties, which almost always take the form of monetary sanctions. But tax noncompliance has other consequences as well. Collateral sanctions for tax noncompliance — which apply on top of traditional tax penalties...

Financial accounting and tax professionals today face a bewildering maze of computational, disclosure, and reporting requirements related to income tax accrual. GAAP financial statements must comply with Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) Topic 740, Income Taxes (formerly FAS 109,...

Tax reform, particularly business tax reform, could be affected by the recent CBO/JCT integration of macroeconomic effects (dynamic scoring) into the official estimate of the Senate immigration bill. Another technical wrinkle is that major institutional approaches to tax distribution all favor,...