Tax shows at this week’s Junior School Discussion board at Richmond (program):

Assaf Harpaz (Drexel; Google Scholar), Worldwide Tax Reform: Challenges to Multilateral Cooperation, 44 U. Pa. J. Int’l L. __ (2023):

In 2021, the OECD proposed new guidelines for the cross-border taxation of multinational firms. The proposed guidelines set forth essentially the most vital reform to worldwide tax guidelines in a number of many years. They observe roughly a decade of multilateral negotiation led by the OECD and drafted by a broader Inclusive Framework of over 140 international locations. The purpose of this Article is to focus on the significance of multilateral cooperation and illuminate the obstacles to implementing worldwide tax reform. It argues that the brand new worldwide tax framework requires unprecedented multilateral cooperation to reallocate taxing rights and restrict revenue shifting. However such formidable cooperation could also be greater than international locations can accomplish. The brand new guidelines are largely an end result of political compromises slightly than a principled method to tax coverage. They infringe on tax sovereignty, restrict tax competitors, and undermine the financial pursuits of the world’s creating international locations.

Blaine Saito (Northeastern; Google Scholar), Public Tax Actors: 

The U.S. federal tax system is failing to advertise values of democracy and egalitarianism. Highly effective pursuits like the rich and multinational entities (MNEs) have bent the tax system to their whim. In the meantime deprived teams and the working class have little voice or enter within the growth of tax coverage, whilst taxation serves as the muse of the state and touches nearly each side of individuals’s lives. The outcome then is a system that additional entrenches these pursuits.

This text seeks to intervene to revive democratic values to taxation. It advances the concept of democratic equality as a guiding worth for the tax system, because it encompasses most of the numerous ideas students concerned within the intersection of tax and democracy have raised. The concept is that taxation ought to support in offering individuals with entry to capabilities to take part in all points of civil society and that in creating insurance policies everybody ought to be handled with equal regard. Below its present construction, the tax system fails.

This failure is especially noticeable within the creating Treasury Rules and steerage. Not solely are these pursuits the one ones who remark, however a lot of them have entry to Treasury and the IRS previous to the event of a Discover of Proposed Rulemaking. Many proposals to repair this drawback lack regard for democratic values. Moreover, the system is captured each in conventional and nontraditional methods comparable to info seize, whereby solely sure voices produce reams of knowledge for regulatory choices, and cultural seize, whereby the individuals working are extra culturally aligned and work together extra repeatedly with individuals who signify already well-off pursuits.

The intervention proposed is to create a grant program to develop tax capability in a broad vary of civil society organizations. Drawing from parallels in state utility charge hearings and the superfund, which offer related kinds of funds, these grants would go to teams starting from native organizations to massive nationwide organizations. These grants may then assist join new constituencies to the event of Treasury Rules. Moreover, Treasury and the IRS ought to search to interact all grant recipients actively, searching for enter not solely by way of feedback, however even through the growth of regulatory priorities. Such a program may assist advance democratic equality within the tax system in addition to enhance the general outcomes of taxation.

Danny Schaffa (Richmond), Measuring Tax Complexity

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2023/05/tax-papers-at-todays-junior-faculty-forum-at-richmond.html