Tax Justice Roundtable & Research Symposium--McGill Faculty of Law

Next week the McGill Faculty of Law will be hosting a roundtable and research symposium on Tax Justice.

The roundtable will be held on Wednesday May 29 at 7:30 and will be preceded by a 5-7 cocktail, both at the McGill Faculty of Law.  John Christensen, James Henry, Diana Gibson, and Frédéric Zalac will each present their ideas on what it means to talk about justice in taxation. The roundtable is free, open to the public, and will be live webcast here.

The research symposium will be held the following day, Thursday, May 30, beginning at 9:30 am at the McGill Faculty of Law. The idea of the symposium is to bring together academics, researchers, and other interested parties to talk about what research has been done, is currently being done, and needs to be done in order to further the cause of seeking justice in taxation.  You can view the preliminary program here. All are welcome, registration is required.

More info at the links above.

Monday: Lisa Philipps on Income Splitting at McGill

Professor Lisa Philipps will be at McGill this Monday, where she will present a paper as part of our Tax Policy Colloquium Series.  Her paper, entitled Income Splitting and Gender Equality: The Case for Incentivizing Intra-household Wealth Transfers, is a chapter in Challenging Gender Inequality in Tax Policy Making: Comparative Perspectives (Kim Brooks, Asa Gunnarsson, Lisa Philipps, Maria Wersig, eds., Oxford: Hart Publishing Inc, 2011).

It opens as follows:

In this chapter, I examine the problem of income splitting under an individual tax unit and Canadian legal developments that have expanded the scope for such tax planning by spouses. Income splitting poses a dilemma for tax policy analysts concerned with gender equality because, left unchecked, it opens a back door to joint taxation, with its troubling impact on labour-market incentives for secondary earners, who are mainly women. Yet ignoring intra-familial transfers in order to prevent income splitting may disrespect women's individual agency over property to which they hold legal title, and it may close off a potential source of economic power for those who do the bulk of the unpaid work in a household. This tax policy dilemma engages fundamental, normative debates about the meaning of gender equality and whether it is possible to enhance women's access to markets while also valuing and compensating their unpaid contributions. 

The Colloquium is open to all.  If you will be in Montreal tomorrow, I invite you to join us at 11:35 am at the McGill Law Faculty, Chancellor Day Hall Room 202, 3644 Peel Street.

Next Monday: Art Cockfield on FATCA

Professor Arthur Cockfield will be at McGill next Monday, where he will present his paper on FATCA as part of our Tax Policy Colloquium Series.  It promises to be a lively discussion, as the issues here are many and difficult.  Here is the title and abstract:

The Limits of the International Tax Regime as a Commitment Projector

The paper examines how transaction cost approaches (as developed by North and Williamson) can inform international tax law and policy discussions.  The international tax regime evolved institutions and institutional arrangements to address transaction costs such as the risk that two countries might doubly tax the same cross-border business profits.  It mainly sought to reduce this risk by serving as a ‘commitment projector’ that enables governments to make credible political promises to taxpayers, other members of the public and other governments that they will not overtax these cross-border profits.  As a result of these political commitments, taxpayers do not need to incur transaction costs they would otherwise have to sustain to identify and protect their global tax liabilities. In other areas, however, the international tax regime does not facilitate credible commitments.   The talk will focus on one such challenge to the regime, namely the 2010 U.S. proposal to create a global tax reporting system via the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act or FATCA.  By eschewing traditional bilateral and multilateral cooperation when it introduced FATCA, the United States subverted its ability to offer credible commitments and raised transaction costs for economic participants.  The talk will review the impact of FATCA on U.S. expatriates (and others) in Canada as well as potential options available to the Canadian government to resist FATCA.

Anyone following FATCA in Canada knows that Prof. Cockfield has been tough on the regime, and I look forward to hearing him flesh out his position in person.  The Colloquium is open to all.  If you will be in Montreal on Monday, I invite you to join us at 11:35am at the McGill Law Faculty, Chancellor Day Hall Room 202, 3644 Peel Street.  

Today at McGill Law: Miranda Stewart

Miranda Stewart will present a paper on the sham doctrine today as the first speaker of the McGill Tax Policy Colloquium.  It's an interesting paper that raises difficult questions about form and substance in tax law.  If you're in Montreal, I invite you to attend, details at the link.