Fortune Op-Ed:  Firms Are Laughing on the Concept of Paying Taxes as Almost $1 Trillion Goes Offshore Each Yr, Researchers Say, by Ludvig Wier (College of Copenhagen; Google Scholar) & Gabriel Zucman (College of California, Berkeley; Google Scholar):

A couple of decade in the past, the world’s greatest economies agreed to crack down on multinational companies’ abusive use of tax havens. This resulted in a 15-point motion plan that aimed to curb practices that shielded a big chunk of company income from tax authorities.

However, in keeping with our estimates, it hasn’t labored. As a substitute of reining in using tax havens – international locations such because the Bahamas and Cayman Islands with very low or no efficient tax charges – the issue has solely gotten worse.

By our reckoning, companies shifted almost $1 trillion in income earned outdoors of their dwelling international locations to tax havens in 2019, up from $616 billion in 2015, the 12 months earlier than the international tax haven plan was applied by the group of 20 main economies, often known as the G-20. …

In 2019, the entire authorities tax loss globally was $250 billion. U.S. multinational companies alone accounted for about half of that, adopted by the U.Ok. and Germany.

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[T]he root reason behind profit-shifting is the incentives concerned, resembling beneficiant or lenient company tax charges in different international locations. If international locations may agree on a international minimal company tax fee of, say, 20%, the issue of profit-shifting would, in our estimation, largely disappear, as tax havens would merely stop to exist.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2023/03/corporations-are-laughing-at-the-idea-of-paying-taxes-as-nearly-1-trillion-goes-offshore-every-year.html