The work marked by (‡) was cited by the European Commission`s 2017 summary as the most important research on tax havens. [40] Another key role played by major destinations for cross-border investors is to help them defend themselves against claims from creditors, disgruntled business partners, family members, blackmailers and governments. Here, offshore oases such as the Cook Islands (Trust Act 1989), the Cayman Islands (1989), Nevis (1994), Bermuda, Belize and the Bahamas set the tone in terms of key guarantees – “self-settled” trusts, very short timelines (two to four years) to combat fraudulent transfers, and the cost and effort of prosecuting cases in remote jurisdictions. Zucman followed his 2015 book with several co-authored articles focused on corporate use of tax havens, titled The Missing Profits of Nations (2016-2018),[14][15] and The Exorbitant Tax Privilege (2018),[88][89], which showed that companies protect more than $250 billion a year from taxes. Zucman showed that nearly half of them are U.S. companies[131] and that they have been the driving force behind how U.S. companies have accumulated between $1 trillion and $2 trillion in offshore cash deposits since 2004. [132] Zucmans (et al.) The analysis showed that global GDP figures were significantly distorted by MULTINATIONAL BEPS flows. [133] [31] U.S. multinationals use tax havens more often than multinationals from other countries that have maintained their controlled regulations for foreign companies. No other non-port OECD country has as high a proportion of foreign profits recorded in tax havens as the United States.
[…] This suggests that half of all global profits that are transferred to tax havens are transferred by US multinationals. In contrast, about 25% are represented by EU countries, 10% by the rest of the OECD and 15% by developing countries (Tørsløv et al., 2018). From the point of view of these large cross-border investors, it depends on the whole network, not on any particular channel. Any – or even ten – oases of ducts could disappear completely, and yet the entire network would quickly cool down. On the other hand, the relative handful of first-class destinations is not so easy to replace. They are home to less viable investments such as real estate, art, yachts and housing rights. They also provide the essential business conditions, as sophisticated money laundering and tax evasion services are unlikely to become DIY activities anytime soon. The historical focus on the fight against tax havens (e.g. OECD and IMF projects) has focused on common standards, transparency and data exchange. [29] The rise of OECD-compliant corporate tax havens, whose BEPS instruments were responsible for most of the taxes lost[30],[19][16] has led to criticism of this approach in relation to taxes actually paid. [31] [32] Countries with higher taxes, such as the United States and many EU member states, moved away from the OECD`s BEPS project in 2017/18 in order to introduce anti-BEPS tax regimes to specifically increase net taxes paid by companies in corporate tax havens (e.g. B the United States.
Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (“TCJA”), the GILTI-BEAT-FDII tax systems and the transition to a hybrid “territorial” tax system. and proposal for EU rules on the taxation of digital services and the EU Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base). [31] Here are the 15 best axe oases in the world, according to CORPNET. The blacklist was reportedly based on a year-long close review of 213 countries, which it assessed based on “1,600 indicators” of its tax justice and transparency efforts. [4] It was nothing like that. The first draft was a dog breakfast from 17 countries whose contribution to the global port industry was trivial at best. Their size varied from South Korea to American Samoa, which has the same population as Niagara Falls. The list was also constantly evolving. [5] The second draft, released in March 2018, just as Panama`s Mossack Fonseca was closing, moved 11 of the original 17 to a “grey list,” adding three new lowercase letters. In the end, the list managed to omit all the world`s major secrecy jurisdictions, including all European Union ports – for example, Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Malta and Latvia. [6] Important Middle Eastern refuges such as Dubai, Bahrain and Lebanon, as well as important Asian ports such as Singapore and Hong Kong, which happen to be important trading partners of the EU, have also been omitted. Sovereign states or autonomous regions considered both as large tax havens for companies and large traditional tax havens: The longest list of non-governmental quantitative studies on tax havens is the CORPNET study of the University of Amsterdam in July 2017 Conduit and Sink OFCs with 29 (5 Conduit OFCs and 25 Sink OFCs).
Below are the 20 largest (5 OFC Conduit and 15 OFC Sink), which align with other main lists as follows: Neither the United States nor Germany are on a list of tax havens of the most important academic leaders in tax haven research, namely James R. Hines Jr., Dhammika Dharmapala or Gabriel Zucman. There are no known cases where foreign companies make tax reversals to the United States or Germany for tax purposes, a fundamental feature of a corporate tax haven. [84] Blatant tax reversals from U.S. companies to primarily Caribbean tax havens (e.B. Bermuda and cayman Islands), the U.S. Congress, with the passage of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, included Regulation 7874 in the IRS Code. .