Country-by-Country Reporting and Other Financial Transparency Measures Affecting the European Union

The EU faces large amounts of financial secrecy supplied to it by secrecy jurisdictions. In this chapter, we use the Bilateral Financial Secrecy Index to quantify which jurisdictions supply most secrecy to EU Member States. The chapter assesses the progress of two recent EU policy efforts to tackle financial secrecy: automatic exchange of country-by-country reporting (CbCR) data and black and grey list of non-cooperative jurisdictions. It is found that 34 per cent of the financial secrecy faced by the EU is supplied by other Member States, whose a priori exclusion from the blacklisting exercise reveals its fundamental flaw. Further 13 per cent is supplied by the EU’s dependencies, mainly the UK’s Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and Guernsey. The jurisdictions that supply the most secrecy not covered by automatic information exchange of CbCR data are the British Virgin Islands, United States, and Curacao. Finally the chapter discusses policy recommendations that stem from our analysis.

Reappraising the Tax Gap

The tax gap has been described as the amount of tax jurisdictions do not collect, caused by the tax system not being appropriately complied with—in the manner intended by the tax authority—given the current tax laws in operation. That description does, however, ignore the fact that substantial parts of their potential tax revenues are not collected by all governments as a result of their decisions not to tax some tax bases, or because of granted tax allowances, reliefs and exemptions, many of which in turn provide opportunities for tax abuse. This chapter considers the implications of reframing the tax gap to include these tax losses that arise as a result of government policy and suggests the changes in perception, including in macro-economic as well as micro-economic thinking, that might result if this were done. For this, the use of tax spillover analysis is recommended.

Actors and Authority in the International Tax Ecosystem

This chapter provides an interdisciplinary framework for understanding changes in the international tax ecosystem. The chapter describes three broad disciplinary approaches to taxation grouped according to assumptions of how actors operate and project authority. On this basis, the international tax ecosystem framework consists of four components, with associated actors and forms of authority: jurisdictions, political mandates, markets, and normative environments. The framework emphasizes a sensitivity to different kinds of actorhood, and how changes are driven by actors’ claims to different forms of authority. After outlining the history of the international tax ecosystem, the framework is applied to present the most important changes to the tax ecology in the last decade. We argue that the evolution in the ecosystem is characterized by persistent legal indeterminacy and political complexity. The scholarly concern, then, is being open to different forms of actorhood and authority while untangling evolution within the international tax ecosystem.

Identification Infrastructures and the Capitalization of Data in the Development of Data-Driven Regulation

This chapter discusses the establishment of a global identification infrastructure to improve the regulation of financial markets. The Global Legal Entity Identifier System (GLEIS), was developed to enable financial regulators to trace the owners of financial assets and liabilities, which was revealed as a problem by the global financial crisis of 2008. This chapter focuses on one of the key controversies that arose as part of the development of GLEIS—the issue of data quality. The chapter uses the GLEIS case to explain how differing views among infrastructure participants about the development of a complex data-driven regulatory system are reconciled. It shows that establishing such a system involves the turning of publicly available data into valuable assets in a process the chapter calls ‘capitalization through certification’ and argue that this process is relevant to broader debates about the use of business intelligence and analytics tools and techniques for regulatory purposes.

The Implications of Making Tax Crimes a Predicate Crime for Money Laundering in the EU

This chapter sheds light on the divergence of tax crimes and money laundering laws across Europe after the implementation of the 4th Anti Money Laundering Directive. Laws are a crucial part of the tax environment as they are one of the rules under which the tax ecosystem operates. Taxpayers should pay their taxes following the law, and tax experts should advise them within the realm of it. The chapter sees the 4th AMLD as a shock that put money laundering regulation inside the tax ecosystem, and the way that countries implement this in their regulation is the response to this shock; it uses an innovative comparative approach that involves the analysis of tax evasion through an empirical legal lens. The chapter includes a dataset built by the authors with the legislation of all European Union countries regarding tax crimes and money laundering, as well as other relevant legal variables.

How Big Are Illicit Financial Flows?

In recent years several leaks have given us insight into how the wealthy and criminals hide their money. The boom of leaks has resulted in a ‘hot phase’ in tax regulation. As a result, the number of studies that want to measure illicit financial flows has also increased. This chapter tries to provide an overview of this booming new field. What do all these studies teach us about the seriousness and size of tax avoidance, tax evasion, and money laundering? What is precisely measured, and how? This chapter concludes that the term ‘Illicit Financial Flows’ has become a bit of a floating identifier, a name that is vague enough to be used for many different concepts but at the cost of losing its meaning. We argue that decomposing the problem of illicit financial flows and what each study aims to measure, might give more useful insights.

Tax Experts’ Response to Regulatory and Institutional Triggers

This chapter explores the situations in which tax experts are most likely to take an innovative or aggressive tax position, focusing on the self-perception of the experts themselves of the factors that may influence them in taking such a position. The results highlight the micro-influences on tax experts that may move them along the spectrum of tax avoidance, which has been acknowledged as posing a significant risk to public welfare, equality of opportunity, and the common good. The chapter presents findings from an international survey of tax professionals and experts and highlights some key risk factors. The factors that lead tax experts to take a position that pushes the envelope of regulation are explored in aggregate and compared across the jurisdictional boundary of high or low levels of financial secrecy. The findings have the potential to empower both regulators and professional bodies in addressing the problem of tax avoidance.

The Corporate Tax Haven Index

In this chapter, we set out a new approach to the geography of profit shifting, based on a range of objectively verifiable criteria. These are combined in the Corporate Tax Haven Index, published for the first time in 2019. We present the technical argument for the index as a meaningful representation of the global distribution of the risks of corporate tax abuse and explore the new geography that emerges. Our findings show the UK’s dominant responsibility for corporate tax avoidance risks and the colonial roots of many exploitative double tax treaties. We discuss the index’s political implications for the immediate process of international tax reform, and for the longer-term prospects for global governance in this area. Greater clarity about the geography of profit shifting is likely to support growing demands for redistribution not only of taxing rights but also of decision-making power in the global architecture for tax governance.

Conclusions

This chapter presents the conclusions of the book in the light of the ecosystem approach. The chapter shows that there is a paradigm shift in the international taxation regime. Also, although international regulations such as Automatic Exchange of Information show some impact, the regulation aimed to tackle corporate tax avoidance, like BEPS, was less successful. Finally, the chapter outlines concrete policy measures to increase transparency and reduce secrecy. There is an emphasis, as in so many of the chapters in this book, on the idea that increasing transparency and reducing secrecy is the magic tool for combatting tax avoidance, tax evasion and money laundering, and for empowering the regulators.

Introduction

In the wake of the financial crisis and the ensuing fiscal crisis, international organizations, as well as the EU and its Member States reacted by putting forth new tax policy regulations at the national and international level. These innovations constitute a significant change, in tax policy and for the EU fiscal regime. In this chapter, the editors give an overview of the context and process that gave rise to the boom in regulations in recent years. All chapters in the book are outlined in the context of the tax ecosystem. This setting remains as a guideline throughout the analyses of global policies in the book.