Rapid developments in automation technology pose a risk of mass displacement of human labour, resulting in the need to support and retrain displaced workers (a negative externality). We propose an “automation tax” that would slow the adoption of automation technology in appropriate...

The principal purpose of this paper is to derive an expected value measure of the tax underreporting rate given only tax authority enforcement data. The main result is that the expected value measure of the underreporting rate is a modified geometric mean function of the audit rate and the...

Taxpayers who hide assets abroad to evade taxes present a serious enforcement challenge for the United States. In response, the United States has developed a family of initiatives that punish and rehabilitate non-compliant taxpayers, raise revenues, and require widespread reporting of offshore...

This chapter is divided into three main parts: 1) international tax law, 2) domestic tax law, and 3) tax and regulation. The first part deals with the international tax system and the way it has been affected by technology. This part will focus on income tax. Existing rules of nexus,...

Taking Singapore as an example, this article lays out a series of tests for determining whether gains arising from the disposal of cryptocurrencies are trade or business income, “all other income” or capital gains. It also considers the possibility of a presumption that individuals engaging...

Economic substance - the concept that a transaction should actually move money around - is one of a short list of doctrines designed to back stop the tax system. It is possible, indeed, the aim of not a few tax practitioners, to create transactions that meet the requirements of the Code - the...

Our system of federal taxes is a set of laws, enacted by Congress and signed by the President. The practice of tax law is generally the practice of law. So why are the non-lawyers the ones practicing in this field? This article examines the regulation of the practice of law, including the...

When digital tokens are used in debt finance, one cannot assume that the same orthodox tax treatment will apply. The highly specific nature of tax provisions means that they may apply very differently once digital tokens rather than fiat currency are involved. Through a case study of Singapore...

The post highlights three main issues that may result from the rapid and widespread automation of jobs: 1) declining tax revenues; 2) inequitable distribution of gains and losses from automation; and 3) social costs of job displacement, such as social support and retraining programmes for...