On April 5, 2021, U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet YELLEN “grabbed the attention of the occupants of corner offices worldwide with a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. The headline was a call for countries to agree on a global minimum tax rate for large companies.” (The Economist, April 8, 2021). In the slipstream,…
The inspiration for this post is “The Made In America Tax Plan” (https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/MadeInAmericaTaxPlan_Report.pdf) recently released by the U.S. Department of the Treasury to outline President Biden’s Administration’s outlook on taxation, notably in so far as the “internationalization” of taxpayers’ undertakings is concerned. This is a much shorter version of and directly excerpted from comments I…
Raffaele Russo[1] “In those countries where income taxes are lower than in the United States, the ability to defer the payment of U.S. tax by retaining income in the subsidiary companies provides a tax advantage for companies operating through overseas subsidiaries that is not available to companies operating solely in the United States… The undesirability…
Much controversial research released by the World Health Organization (WHO) at the end of March 2021 has concluded that the inception of the COVID-19 disease is likely due to a crossover of the SARS-CoV-2 virus from animals to humans. Although not unprecedented as an accident, the chances of viruses crossing over from other species to…
Today, there is an exponential increase in new forms of commercialization of goods and the provision of services that make use of digital platforms. This situation is altering the functioning of the transport, delivery and digital services markets, among others. The rise of the sharing and gig economy, powered by digital platforms, has triggered the…
Later this year, the 190 countries that have signed the Paris Agreement on climate change will meet at COP 26 in Glasgow—subject to the possibility of continuing pandemic-related travel restrictions—to discuss their respective plans for reducing harmful greenhouse-gas emissions. They are collectively committed to taking action in order to limit global warming to “well below”…
Introduction The Covid-19 pandemic has produced an exponential increase in e-commerce, with new business models to market goods and services, and also a profound change in the consumption habits of the population, including forms of electronic payments, such as cryptocurrencies. On the one hand, there is a huge loss of revenue from this crisis. Still,…
The VAT treatment of the activities carried out by public entities has traditionally been a source of debate. Article 13 of the VAT Directive offers a short and limited regulation of the activities of public entities for VAT purposes. Generally speaking, the activities of public entities acting as such (that is to say: when using…
Luisa Scarcella (DigiTax Centre at University of Antwerp; Member of the Working Party on Tax & Legal Matters) The recent rise in the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and crypto-assets accompanied by the rapid growth of crypto-assets providers has caught the attention of the EU regulator once again. Due to the heterogeneity in the…
For a number of years, endeavors to reform the Swiss federal withholding tax system with regard to the taxation of interest from collective debt instruments have been going on. The reform is generally aimed at strengthening the Swiss debt capital market. The latest proposals would completely do away with federal withholding tax on bond interest….
Mukesh Butani, Seema Kejriwal & Ajitesh Dayal Singh Introduction The Supreme Court of India recently settled a two-decade old dispute pertaining to taxability of software income. The Supreme Court ruled that payments to non-resident software vendors/licensors cannot be treated as payment towards royalty, and hence no withholding tax liability can be imposed on the resident…
Nevia Čičin-Šain and Joachim Englisch* The sixth amendment of the Directive on administrative cooperation has just been adopted by Council, on 22 March. Earlier drafts of DAC 7 have received certain attention mostly for the new regime of documentation and reporting obligations imposed upon digital platforms. However, the new Directive also features numerous other important…
Introduction The first part of my reflections on case C-77/19 Kaplan International Colleges UK (further referred to as Kaplan) concerned the relationship between membership in a VAT group on the one hand and a cost-sharing group on the other. In this article, I will comment on the questions referred to the CJEU, which the Court…
(The full version will be published in Intertax, vol. 49, 2021, issue 5) Nicole Gubbels, Assistant Professor (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Fiscal Institute of Tilburg University, the Netherlands) Society has changed considerably over the past 50 years. Whereas, previously, most people got married, had several children during the marriage, and divorce was still relatively rare,…
