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Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Laissez-faire

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Laissez-faire (/ˌlɛsˈfɛər/; French: [lɛsefɛʁ] (About this soundlisten); from French: laissez faire, lit.'let do') is an economic system in which transactions between private groups of people are free from or almost free from any form of economic interventionism such as regulation and subsidies. As a system of thought, laissez-faire rests on the axioms that the individual is the basic unit in society and has a natural right to freedom; that the physical order of nature is a harmonious and self-regulating system; and that corporations are creatures of the state and therefore the citizens must watch them closely due to their propensity to disrupt the Smithian spontaneous order.

Proponents of laissez-faire argue for a complete separation of government from the economic sector. The phrase laissez-faire is part of a larger French phrase and literally translates to "let [it/them] do", but in this context the phrase usually means to "let it be" and in expression "laid back." Although never practiced with full consistency, laissez-faire capitalism emerged in the mid-18th century and was further popularized by Adam Smith's book The Wealth of Nations. It was most prominent in Britain and the United States during this period but both economies became steadily more controlled throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. While associated with capitalism in common usage, there are also non-capitalist forms of laissez-faire, including some forms of market socialism.

Etymology and usage

The term laissez-faire likely originated in a meeting that took place around 1681 between powerful French Controller-General of Finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert and a group of French businessmen headed by M. Le Gendre. When the eager mercantilist minister asked how the French state could be of service to the merchants and help promote their commerce, Le Gendre replied simply: "Laissez-nous faire" ("Leave it to us" or "Let us do [it]", the French verb not requiring an object).

The anecdote on the Colbert–Le Gendre meeting appeared in a 1751 article in the Journal économique, written by French minister and champion of free trade René de Voyer, Marquis d'Argenson—also the first known appearance of the term in print. Argenson himself had used the phrase earlier (1736) in his own diaries in a famous outburst:

Laissez faire, telle devrait être la devise de toute puissance publique, depuis que le monde est civilisé [...]. Détestable principe que celui de ne vouloir grandir que par l'abaissement de nos voisins ! Il n'y a que la méchanceté et la malignité du cœur de satisfaites dans ce principe, et l’intérêt y est opposé. Laissez faire, morbleu ! Laissez faire !!

Let go, which should be the motto of all public power, since the world was civilized [...]. [It is] a detestable principle of those that want to enlarge [themselves] but by the abasement of our neighbours. There is but the wicked and the malignant heart[s] [who are] satisfied by this principle and [its] interest is opposed. Let go, for God's sake! Let go!!

— René Louis de Voyer de Paulmy d'Argenson

Vincent de Gournay, a French Physiocrat and intendant of commerce in the 1750s, popularized the term laissez-faire as he allegedly adopted it from François Quesnay's writings on China. Quesnay coined the phrases laissez-faire and laissez-passer, laissez-faire being a translation of the Chinese term wu wei (無為). Gournay ardently supported the removal of restrictions on trade and the deregulation of industry in France. Delighted with the Colbert–Le Gendre anecdote, he forged it into a larger maxim all his own: "Laissez faire et laissez passer" ("Let do and let pass"). His motto has also been identified as the longer "Laissez faire et laissez passer, le monde va de lui même !" ("Let do and let pass, the world goes on by itself!"). Although Gournay left no written tracts on his economic policy ideas, he had immense personal influence on his contemporaries, notably his fellow Physiocrats, who credit both the laissez-faire slogan and the doctrine to Gournay.

Before d'Argenson or Gournay, P. S. de Boisguilbert had enunciated the phrase "On laisse faire la nature" ("Let nature run its course"). D'Argenson himself during his life was better known for the similar, but less-celebrated motto "Pas trop gouverner" ("Govern not too much").

The Physiocrats proclaimed laissez-faire in 18th-century France, placing it at the very core of their economic principles and famous economists, beginning with Adam Smith, developed the idea. It is with the Physiocrats and the classical political economy that the term laissez-faire is ordinarily associated. The book Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State states: "The physiocrats, reacting against the excessive mercantilist regulations of the France of their day, expressed a belief in a 'natural order' or liberty under which individuals in following their selfish interests contributed to the general good. Since, in their view, this natural order functioned successfully without the aid of government, they advised the state to restrict itself to upholding the rights of private property and individual liberty, to removing all artificial barriers to trade, and to abolishing all useless laws".

The French phrase laissez-faire gained currency in English-speaking countries with the spread of Physiocratic literature in the late 18th century. George Whatley's 1774 Principles of Trade (co-authored with Benjamin Franklin) re-told the Colbert-LeGendre anecdote—this may mark the first appearance of the phrase in an English-language publication.

Herbert Spencer was opposed to a slightly different application of laissez faire—to "that miserable laissez-faire" that leads to men's ruin, saying: "Along with that miserable laissez-faire which calmly looks on while men ruin themselves in trying to enforce by law their equitable claims, there goes activity in supplying them, at other men's cost, with gratis novel-reading!" In Spencer's case, the right of private ownership was being assailed and it was that miserable spirit of laissez-faire in halls of legislation that exhausted men in the effort of protecting their right.

As a product of the Enlightenment, laissez-faire was "conceived as the way to unleash human potential through the restoration of a natural system, a system unhindered by the restrictions of government". In a similar vein, Adam Smith viewed the economy as a natural system and the market as an organic part of that system. Smith saw laissez-faire as a moral program and the market its instrument to ensure men the rights of natural law. By extension, free markets become a reflection of the natural system of liberty. For Smith, laissez-faire was "a program for the abolition of laws constraining the market, a program for the restoration of order and for the activation of potential growth".

However, Smith and notable classical economists such as Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo did not use the phrase. Jeremy Bentham used the term, but it was probably James Mill's reference to the laissez-faire maxim (together with the "Pas trop gouverner" motto) in an 1824 entry for the Encyclopædia Britannica that really brought the term into wider English usage. With the advent of the Anti-Corn Law League (founded 1838), the term received much of its English meaning.

Smith first used the metaphor of an invisible hand in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) to describe the unintentional effects of economic self-organization from economic self-interest. Although not the metaphor itself, the idea lying behind the invisible hand belongs to Bernard de Mandeville and his Fable of the Bees (1705). In political economy, that idea and the doctrine of laissez-faire have long been closely related. Some have characterized the invisible-hand metaphor as one for laissez-faire, although Smith never actually used the term himself. In Third Millennium Capitalism (2000), Wyatt M. Rogers Jr. notes a trend whereby recently "conservative politicians and economists have chosen the term 'free-market capitalism' in lieu of laissez-faire".

American individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker saw themselves as economic laissez-faire socialists and political individualists while arguing that their "anarchistic socialism" or "individual anarchism" was "consistent Manchesterism".

History

Europe

In Europe, the laissez-faire movement was first widely promoted by the Physiocrats, a movement that included Vincent de Gournay (1712–1759), a successful merchant turned political figure. Gournay is postulated to have adapted the Taoist concept wu wei, from the writings on China by François Quesnay (1694–1774). Gournay held that government should allow the laws of nature to govern economic activity, with the state only intervening to protect life, liberty and property. François Quesnay and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de l'Aulne took up Gournay's ideas. Quesnay had the ear of the King of France, Louis XV and in 1754 persuaded him to give laissez-faire a try. On September 17, the King abolished all tolls and restraints on the sale and transport of grain. For more than a decade, the experiment appeared successful, but 1768 saw a poor harvest, and the cost of bread rose so high that there was widespread starvation while merchants exported grain in order to obtain the best profit. In 1770, the Comptroller-General of Finances Joseph Marie Terray revoked the edict allowing free trade in grain.

The doctrine of laissez-faire became an integral part of 19th-century European liberalism. Just as liberals supported freedom of thought in the intellectual sphere, so were they equally prepared to champion the principles of free trade and free competition in the sphere of economics, seeing the state as merely a passive policeman, protecting private property and administering justice, but not interfering with the affairs of its citizens. Businessmen, British industrialists in particular, were quick to associate these principles with their own economic interests. Many of the ideas of the physiocrats spread throughout Europe and were adopted to a greater or lesser extent in Sweden, Tuscany, Spain and in the newly created United States. Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations (1776), met Quesnay and acknowledged his influence.

In Britain, the newspaper The Economist (founded in 1843) became an influential voice for laissez-faire capitalism. Laissez-faire advocates opposed food aid for famines occurring within the British Empire. In 1847, referring to the famine then underway in Ireland, founder of The Economist James Wilson wrote: "It is no man's business to provide for another". More specifically, in An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus argued that there was nothing that could be done to avoid famines because he felt he had mathematically proven that population growth tends to exceed growth in food production. However, The Economist campaigned against the Corn Laws that protected landlords in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland against competition from less expensive foreign imports of cereal products. The Great Famine in Ireland in 1845 led to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. The tariffs on grain which kept the price of bread artificially high were repealed. However, repeal of the Corn Laws came too late to stop the Irish famine, partly because it was done in stages over three years.

A group that became known as the Manchester Liberals, to which Richard Cobden (1804–1865) and John Bright (1811–1889) belonged, were staunch defenders of free trade. After the death of Cobden, the Cobden Club (founded in 1866) continued their work. In 1860, Britain and France concluded a trade treaty, after which other European countries signed several similar treaties. The breakdown of laissez-faire as practised by the British Empire was partly led by British companies eager for state support of their positions abroad, in particular British oil companies.

United States

Frank Bourgin's study of the Constitutional Convention and subsequent decades argues that direct government involvement in the economy was intended by the Founding Fathers. The reason for this was the economic and financial chaos the nation suffered under the Articles of Confederation. The goal was to ensure that dearly-won political independence was not lost by being economically and financially dependent on the powers and princes of Europe. The creation of a strong central government able to promote science, invention, industry and commerce was seen as an essential means of promoting the general welfare and making the economy of the United States strong enough for them to determine their own destiny. Others view Bourgin's study, written in the 1940s and not published until 1989, as an over-interpretation of the evidence, intended originally to defend the New Deal and later to counter Ronald Reagan's economic policies.

Historian Kathleen G. Donohue argues that in the 19th century liberalism in the United States had distinctive characteristics and that "at the center of classical liberal theory [in Europe] was the idea of laissez-faire. To the vast majority of American classical liberals, however, laissez-faire did not mean "no government intervention" at all. On the contrary, they were more than willing to see government provide tariffs, railroad subsidies, and internal improvements, all of which benefited producers". Notable examples of government intervention in the period prior to the American Civil War include the establishment of the Patent Office in 1802; the establishment of the Office of Standard Weights and Measures in 1830; the creation of the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1807 and other measures to improve river and harbor navigation; the various Army expeditions to the west, beginning with Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery in 1804 and continuing into the 1870s, almost always under the direction of an officer from the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers and which provided crucial information for the overland pioneers that followed; the assignment of Army Engineer officers to assist or direct the surveying and construction of the early railroads and canals; and the establishment of the First Bank of the United States and Second Bank of the United States as well as various protectionist measures (e.g. the tariff of 1828). Several of these proposals met with serious opposition and required a great deal of horse-trading to be enacted into law. For instance, the First National Bank would not have reached the desk of President George Washington in the absence of an agreement that was reached between Alexander Hamilton and several Southern members of Congress to locate the capitol in the District of Columbia. In contrast to Hamilton and the Federalists was Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's opposing political party, the Democratic-Republicans.

Most of the early opponents of laissez-faire capitalism in the United States subscribed to the American School. This school of thought was inspired by the ideas of Hamilton, who proposed the creation of a government-sponsored bank and increased tariffs to favor Northern industrial interests. Following Hamilton's death, the more abiding protectionist influence in the antebellum period came from Henry Clay and his American System. In the early 19th century, "it is quite clear that the laissez-faire label is an inappropriate one" to apply to the relationship between the United States government and industry. In the mid-19th century, the United States followed the Whig tradition of economic nationalism, which included increased state control, regulation and macroeconomic development of infrastructure. Public works such as the provision and regulation transportation such as railroads took effect. The Pacific Railway Acts provided the development of the First Transcontinental Railroad. In order to help pay for its war effort in the Civil War, the United States government imposed its first personal income tax on 5 August 1861 as part of the Revenue Act of 1861 (3% of all incomes over US$800; rescinded in 1872).

Following the Civil War, the movement towards a mixed economy accelerated. Protectionism increased with the McKinley Tariff of 1890 and the Dingley Tariff of 1897. Government regulation of the economy expanded with the enactment of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Anti-trust Act. The Progressive Era saw the enactment of more controls on the economy as evidenced by the Woodrow Wilson administration's New Freedom program. Following World War I and the Great Depression, the United States turned to a mixed economy which combined free enterprise with a progressive income tax and in which from time to time the government stepped in to support and protect American industry from competition from overseas. For example, in the 1980s the government sought to protect the automobile industry by "voluntary" export restrictions from Japan.

In 1986, Pietro S. Nivola wrote: "By and large, the comparative strength of the dollar against major foreign currencies has reflected high U.S. interest rates driven by huge federal budget deficits. Hence, the source of much of the current deterioration of trade is not the general state of the economy, but rather the government's mix of fiscal and monetary policies – that is, the problematic juxtaposition of bold tax reductions, relatively tight monetary targets, generous military outlays, and only modest cuts in major entitlement programs. Put simply, the roots of the trade problem and of the resurgent protectionism it has fomented are fundamentally political as well as economic".

A more recent advocate of total laissez-faire has been Objectivist Ayn Rand, who described it as "the abolition of any and all forms of government intervention in production and trade, the separation of State and Economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of Church and State". This viewpoint is summed up in what is known as the iron law of regulation, which states that all government economic regulation eventually leads to a net loss in social welfare. Rand's political philosophy emphasized individual rights (including property rights) and she considered laissez-faire capitalism the only moral social system because in her view it was the only system based on the protection of those rights. She opposed statism, which she understood to include theocracy, absolute monarchy, Nazism, fascism, communism, socialism and dictatorship. Rand believed that natural rights should be enforced by a constitutionally limited government. Although her political views are often classified as conservative or libertarian, she preferred the term "radical for capitalism". She worked with conservatives on political projects, but disagreed with them over issues such as religion and ethics. She denounced libertarianism, which she associated with anarchism. She rejected anarchism as a naïve theory based in subjectivism that could only lead to collectivism in practice.

Models

Capitalism

A closely related conception is that of raw or pure capitalism, or unrestrained capitalism, that refers to capitalism free of social regulations, with low, minimal or no government and operating almost entirely on the profit motive. Other than laissez-faire economics and anarcho-capitalism, it is not associated with a school of thought. It typically has a bad connotation, which hints towards a perceived need for restraint due to social needs and securities that can not be adequately responded to by companies with just a motive for making profit.

Robert Kuttner states that "for over a century, popular struggles in democracies have used the nation-state to temper raw capitalism. The power of voters has offset the power of capital. But as national barriers have come down in the name of freer commerce, so has the capacity of governments to manage capitalism in a broad public interest. So the real issue is not 'trade' but democratic governance".

The main issues of raw capitalism are said to lie in its disregard for quality, durability, sustainability, respect for the environment and human beings as well as a lack of morality. From this more critical angle, companies might naturally aim to maximise profits at the expense of workers' and broader social interests.

Advocates of laissez-faire capitalism argue that it relies on a constitutionally limited government that unconditionally bans the initiation of force and coercion, including fraud. Therefore, free market economists such as Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell argue that, under such a system, relationships between companies and workers are purely voluntary and mistreated workers will seek better treatment elsewhere. Thus, most companies will compete for workers on the basis of pay, benefits, and work-life balance just as they compete with one another in the marketplace on the basis of the relative cost and quality of their goods.

So-called "raw" or "hyper-capitalism" is a prime motive of cyberpunk in dystopian works such as Syndicate.

Socialism

Although laissez-faire has been commonly associated with capitalism, there is a similar laissez-faire economic theory and system associated with socialism called left-wing laissez-faire, or free-market anarchism, also known as free-market anti-capitalism and free-market socialism to distinguish it from laissez-faire capitalism. One first example of this is mutualism as developed by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the 18th century, from which emerged individualist anarchism. Benjamin Tucker is one eminent American individualist anarchist who adopted a laissez-faire system he termed anarchistic socialism in contraposition to state socialism. This tradition has been recently associated with contemporary scholars such as Kevin Carson, Roderick T. Long, Charles W. Johnson, Brad Spangler, Sheldon Richman, Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Gary Chartier, who stress the value of radically free markets, termed freed markets to distinguish them from the common conception which these left-libertarians believe to be riddled with capitalist and statist privileges. Referred to as left-wing market anarchists or market-oriented left-libertarians, proponents of this approach strongly affirm the classical liberal ideas of self-ownership and free markets while maintaining that taken to their logical conclusions these ideas support anti-capitalist, anti-corporatist, anti-hierarchical and pro-labor positions in economics; anti-imperialism in foreign policy; and thoroughly radical views regarding such cultural issues as gender, sexuality and race. Critics of laissez-faire as commonly understood argues that a truly laissez-faire system would be anti-capitalist and socialist.

Kevin Carson describes his politics as on "the outer fringes of both free market libertarianism and socialism" and has also been highly critical of intellectual property. Carson has identified the work of Benjamin Tucker, Thomas Hodgskin, Ralph Borsodi, Paul Goodman, Lewis Mumford, Elinor Ostrom, Peter Kropotkin and Ivan Illich as sources of inspiration for his approach to politics and economics. In addition to individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker's big four monopolies (land, money, tariffs and patents), he argues that the state has also transferred wealth to the wealthy by subsidizing organizational centralization in the form of transportation and communication subsidies. Carson believes that Tucker overlooked this issue due to Tucker's focus on individual market transactions whereas he also focuses on organizational issues. As such, the primary focus of his most recent work has been decentralized manufacturing and the informal and household economies. The theoretical sections of Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy are also presented as an attempt to integrate marginalist critiques into the labor theory of value.

In response to claims that he uses the term capitalism incorrectly, Carson says he is deliberately choosing to resurrect what he claims to be an old definition of the term in order to "make a point". He claims that "the term 'capitalism,' as it was originally used, did not refer to a free market, but to a type of statist class system in which capitalists controlled the state and the state intervened in the market on their behalf". Carson holds that "capitalism, arising as a new class society directly from the old class society of the Middle Ages, was founded on an act of robbery as massive as the earlier feudal conquest of the land. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege without which its survival is unimaginable". Carson argues that in a truly laissez-faire system the ability to extract a profit from labor and capital would be negligible. Carson coined the pejorative term vulgar libertarianism, a phrase that describes the use of a free market rhetoric in defense of corporate capitalism and economic inequality. According to Carson, the term is derived from the phrase vulgar political economy which Karl Marx described as an economic order that "deliberately becomes increasingly apologetic and makes strenuous attempts to talk out of existence the ideas which contain the contradictions [existing in economic life]".

Gary Chartier offers an understanding of property rights as contingent yet tightly constrained social strategies, reflective of the importance of multiple, overlapping rationales for separate ownership and of natural law principles of practical reasonableness, defending robust yet non-absolute protections for these rights in a manner similar to that employed by David Hume. This account is distinguished both from Lockean and neo-Lockean views which deduce property rights from the idea of self-ownership and from consequentialist accounts that might license widespread ad hoc interference with the possessions of groups and individuals. Chartier uses this account to ground a clear statement of the natural law basis for the view that solidaristic wealth redistribution by individual persons is often morally required, but as a response by individuals and grass-roots networks to particular circumstances rather than as a state-driven attempt to achieve a particular distributive pattern. He advances detailed arguments for workplace democracy rooted in such natural law principles as subsidiarity, defending it as morally desirable and as a likely outcome of the elimination of injustice rather than as something to be mandated by the state.

Chartier has discussed natural law approaches to land reform and to the occupation of factories by workers. He objects on natural law grounds to intellectual property protections, drawing on his theory of property rights more generally and develops a general natural law account of boycotts. He has argued that proponents of genuinely freed markets should explicitly reject capitalism and identify with the global anti-capitalist movement while emphasizing that the abuses the anti-capitalist movement highlights result from state-tolerated violence and state-secured privilege rather than from voluntary cooperation and exchange. According to Chartier, "it makes sense for [freed-market advocates] to name what they oppose 'capitalism.' Doing so calls attention to the freedom movement's radical roots, emphasizes the value of understanding society as an alternative to the state, underscores the fact that proponents of freedom object to non-aggressive as well as aggressive restraints on liberty, ensures that advocates of freedom aren't confused with people who use market rhetoric to prop up an unjust status quo, and expresses solidarity between defenders of freed markets and workers — as well as ordinary people around the world who use "capitalism" as a short-hand label for the world-system that constrains their freedom and stunts their lives".

Criticism

Over the years, a number of economists have offered critiques of laissez-faire economics. Adam Smith acknowledges some moral ambiguities towards the system of capitalism. Smith had misgivings concerning some aspects of each of the major character-types produced by modern capitalist society, namely the landlords, the workers and the capitalists. Smith claimed that "[t]he landlords' role in the economic process is passive. Their ability to reap a revenue solely from ownership of land tends to make them indolent and inept, and so they tend to be unable to even look after their own economic interests" and that "[t]he increase in population should increase the demand for food, which should increase rents, which should be economically beneficial to the landlords". According to Smith, the landlords should be in favour of policies which contribute to the growth in the wealth of nations, but they often are not in favour of these pro-growth policies because of their own indolent-induced ignorance and intellectual flabbiness.

Many philosophers have written on the systems society has created to manage their civilizations. Thomas Hobbes utilized the concept of a "state of nature," which is a time before any government or laws, as a starting point to consider the question. In this time, life would be "war of all against all." Further, "In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain . . . continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Smith was quite clear that he believed that without morality and laws, society would fail. From that perspective, it would be strange for Smith to support a pure Laissez-Faire style of capitalism, and what he does support in Wealth of Nations is heavily dependent on the moral philosophy from his previous work, Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Regardless of preferred political preference, all societies require shared moral values as a prerequisite on which to build laws to protect individuals from each other. Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations during the Enlightenment, a period of time when the prevailing attitude was, "All things can be Known." In effect, European thinkers, inspired by the likes of Isaac Newton and others, set about to "find the laws" of all things, that there existed a "natural law" underlying all aspects of life. They believed that these could be discovered and that everything in the universe could be rationally demystified and cataloged, including human interactions.

Critics and market abolitionists such as David McNally argue in the Marxist tradition that the logic of the market inherently produces inequitable outcomes and leads to unequal exchanges, arguing that Smith's moral intent and moral philosophy espousing equal exchange was undermined by the practice of the free market he championed. According to McNally, the development of the market economy involved coercion, exploitation and violence that Smith's moral philosophy could not countenance.

The British economist John Maynard Keynes condemned laissez-faire economic policy on several occasions. In The End of Laissez-faire (1926), one of the most famous of his critiques, Keynes argues that the doctrines of laissez-faire are dependent to some extent on improper deductive reasoning and says the question of whether a market solution or state intervention is better must be determined on a case-by-case basis.

The Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek stated that a freely competitive, laissez-faire banking industry tends to be endogenously destabilizing and pro-cyclical, arguing that the need for central banking control was inescapable.

Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation criticizes self-regulating markets as aberrational, unnatural phenomena which tend towards social disruption.

Laissez-faire not just in its primitive and European form, but the American laissez-faire, and its result as legalization and granting of doubtful loans, has caused the current global economic crisis and imbalance in the distribution of capital. In fact, the American laissez-faire has become a kind of tool for circumventing economically useful laws.

Laissez-faire in its original sense, that is, independence in private property and the means of production and protection of the rights of individuals against governmental and official aggression, protection of the capital of independent individuals against other individuals, against foreign governments and, most importantly, against the government of the same system. This type of laissez-faire is actually very safe and helpful. But a look at the facts about the United States reveals that many companies that are somehow affiliated with the United States government but are not mentioned in the budget document (they are in fact government but are considered private for misappropriation) are covered by the laissez-faire capitalist system and without the consent of the citizens, they started confiscating public property and circumventing the bans imposed on the government as private companies. In fact, these types of companies have interfered in all economic fields (both in the United States and in the world) and in many ways have violated the economic freedom of citizens and have made laissez-faire such a worthless and unidentified.

In fact, the inefficiency of the laissez-faire is not due to the doctrine itself, but its implementation requires careful reviews and controls. Although this doctrine has been proposed for the balance and ease of economic progress, it does not eliminate poverty from the current situation. With the emergence of monopolies in the world economy by corrupt governments, under the cover of private and individual companies, the balance of supply and demand has been lost and the labor force has suffered these losses and their quality of life has declined.

See also

 

Tax evasion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tax evasion is an illegal attempt to defeat the imposition of taxes by individuals, corporations, trusts, and others. Tax evasion often entails the deliberate misrepresentation of the taxpayer's affairs to the tax authorities to reduce the taxpayer's tax liability, and it includes dishonest tax reporting, such as declaring less income, profits or gains than the amounts actually earned, or overstating deductions.

Tax evasion is an activity commonly associated with the informal economy. One measure of the extent of tax evasion (the "tax gap") is the amount of unreported income, which is the difference between the amount of income that should be reported to the tax authorities and the actual amount reported.

In contrast, tax avoidance is the legal use of tax laws to reduce one's tax burden. Both tax evasion and tax avoidance can be viewed as forms of tax noncompliance, as they describe a range of activities that intend to subvert a state's tax system, but such classification of tax avoidance is disputable since avoidance is lawful in self-creating systems. Tax evasion is often an offence by an individual, while tax avoidance is often a corporate practice.  

Economics

The ratio of German assets in tax havens in relation to the total German GDP, 1996–2008. The "Big 7" shown are Hong Kong, Ireland, Lebanon, Liberia, Panama, Singapore, and Switzerland.

In 1968, Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker first theorized the economics of crime, on the basis of which authors M.G. Allingham and A. Sandmo produced, in 1972, an economic model of tax evasion. This model deals with the evasion of income tax, the main source of tax revenue in developed countries. According to the authors, the level of evasion of income tax depends on the detection probability and the level of punishment provided by law.

The literature's theoretical models are elegant in their effort to identify the variables likely to affect non-compliance. Alternative specifications, however, yield conflicting results concerning both the signs and magnitudes of variables believed to affect tax evasion. Empirical work is required to resolve the theoretical ambiguities. Income tax evasion appears to be positively influenced by the tax rate, the unemployment rate, the level of income and dissatisfaction with government. The U.S. Tax Reform Act of 1986 appears to have reduced tax evasion in the United States.

In a 2017 study Alstadsæter et al. concluded based on random stratified audits and leaked data that occurrence of tax evasion rises sharply as amount of wealth rises and that the very richest are about 10 times more likely than average people to engage in tax evasion.

Tax gap

The tax gap describes how much tax should have been raised in relation to much tax is actually raised.

The tax gap is mainly growing due to two factors, the lack of enforcement on the one hand and the lack of compliance on the other hand. The former is mainly rooted in the costly enforcement of the taxation law. The Iatter is based on the foundation that tax compliance is costly for individuals as well as firms (tax filling, bureaucracy), hence not paying taxes would be more economical in their opinion.

Evasion of customs duty

Customs duties are an important source of revenue in developing countries. Importers attempt to evade customs duty by (a) under-invoicing and (b) misdeclaration of quantity and product-description. When there is ad valorem import duty, the tax base can be reduced through under-invoicing. Misdeclaration of quantity is more relevant for products with specific duty. Production description is changed to match a H. S. Code commensurate with a lower rate of duty.

Smuggling

Smuggling is import or export of products by illegal means. Smuggling is resorted to for total evasion of customs duties, as well as for the import and export of contraband. Smugglers do not pay duty since the transport is covert, so no customs declaration is made.

Evasion of value-added tax and sales taxes

Tax campaigner Richard Murphy's estimate of the ten countries with the largest absolute levels of tax evasion. He estimated that global tax evasion amounts to 5 percent of the global economy.

During the second half of the 20th century, value-added tax (VAT) emerged as a modern form of consumption tax throughout the world, with the notable exception of the United States. Producers who collect VAT from consumers may evade tax by under-reporting the amount of sales. The US has no broad-based consumption tax at the federal level, and no state currently collects VAT; the overwhelming majority of states instead collect sales taxes. Canada uses both a VAT at the federal level (the Goods and Services Tax) and sales taxes at the provincial level; some provinces have a single tax combining both forms.

In addition, most jurisdictions which levy a VAT or sales tax also legally require their residents to report and pay the tax on items purchased in another jurisdiction. This means that consumers who purchase something in a lower-taxed or untaxed jurisdiction with the intention of avoiding VAT or sales tax in their home jurisdiction are technically breaking the law in most cases.

This is especially prevalent in federal countries like the US and Canada where sub-national jurisdictions charge varying rates of VAT or sales tax.

In liberal democracies, a fundamental problem with inhibiting evasion of local sales taxes is that liberal democracies, by their very nature, have few (if any) border controls between their internal jurisdictions. Therefore, it is not generally cost-effective to enforce tax collection on low-value goods carried in private vehicles from one jurisdiction to another with a different tax rate. However, sub-national governments will normally seek to collect sales tax on high-value items such as cars.

Dennis Kozlowski is a particularly notable figure for his alleged evasion of sales tax. What started as an investigation into Kozlowski's failure to declare art purchases for the purpose of evading New York state sales taxes eventually led to Kozlowski's conviction and incarceration on more serious charges related to the misappropriation of funds during his tenure as CEO of Tyco International.

Objectives to evade taxes

One reason for taxpayers to evade taxes are the personal benefits that come with it, thus the individual problems that lead to that decision Additionally, Wallschutzky's ‘exchange relationship hypothesis presents as a sufficient motive for many. The exchange relationship hypothesis states that tax payers believe that the exchange between their taxes and the public good/social services as unbalanced. Furthermore, the little capability of the system to catch the tax evaders poses as another incentive. Most often, it is more economical to evade taxes, being caught and paying a fine as a consequence, than paying the accumulated tax burden over the years. Thus, evasion numbers should be even higher than they are, hence for many people there seem to be moral objective countering this practice.

Government response

The size of the shadow economy in Europe, 2011.

The level of evasion depends on a number of factors, including the amount of money a person or a corporation possesses. Efforts to evade income tax decline when the amounts involved are lower. The level of evasion also depends on the efficiency of the tax administration. Corruption by tax officials make it difficult to control evasion. Tax administrations use various means to reduce evasion and increase the level of enforcement: for example, privatization of tax enforcement or tax farming.

In 2011 HMRC, the UK tax collection agency, stated that it would continue to crack down on tax evasion, with the goal of collecting £18 billion in revenue before 2015. In 2010, HMRC began a voluntary amnesty program that targeted middle-class professionals and raised £500 million.

Corruption by tax officials

Corrupt tax officials co-operate with the taxpayers who intend to evade taxes. When they detect an instance of evasion, they refrain from reporting it in return for bribes. Corruption by tax officials is a serious problem for the tax administration in many countries.

Level of evasion and punishment

Tax evasion is a crime in almost all developed countries, and the guilty party is liable to fines and/or imprisonment. In Switzerland, many acts that would amount to criminal tax evasion in other countries are treated as civil matters. Dishonestly misreporting income in a tax return is not necessarily considered a crime. Such matters are handled in the Swiss tax courts, not the criminal courts.

In Switzerland, however, some tax misconduct (such as the deliberate falsification of records) is criminal. Moreover, civil tax transgressions may give rise to penalties. It is often considered that the extent of evasion depends on the severity of punishment for evasion.

Privatization of tax enforcement

A "Lion's Mouth" postbox for anonymous denunciations at the Doge's Palace in Venice, Italy. Text translation: "Secret denunciations against anyone who will conceal favors and services or will collude to hide the true revenue from them."

Professor Christopher Hood first suggested privatization of tax enforcement to control tax evasion more efficiently than a government department would, and some governments have adopted this approach. In Bangladesh, customs administration was partly privatized in 1991.

Abuse by private tax collectors (see tax farming below) has on occasion led to revolutionary overthrow of governments who have outsourced tax administration.

Tax farming

Tax farming is an historical means of collection of revenue. Governments received a lump sum in advance from a private entity, which then collects and retains the revenue and bears the risk of evasion by the taxpayers. It has been suggested that tax farming may reduce tax evasion in less developed countries.

This system may be liable to abuse by the "tax-farmers" seeking to make a profit, if they are not subject to political constraints. Abuses by tax farmers (together with a tax system that exempted the aristocracy) were a primary reason for the French Revolution that toppled Louis XVI.

PSI agencies

Pre-shipment inspection agencies like Société Générale De Surveillance S. A. and its subsidiary Cotecna are in business to prevent evasion of customs duty through under-invoicing and misdeclaration.

However, PSI agencies have cooperated with importers in evading customs duties. Bangladeshi authorities found Cotecna guilty of complicity with importers for evasion of customs duties on a huge scale. In August 2005, Bangladesh had hired four PSI companies – Cotecna Inspection SA, SGS (Bangladesh) Limited, Bureau Veritas BIVAC (Bangladesh) Limited and INtertek Testing Limited – for three years to certify price, quality and quantity of imported goods. In March 2008, the Bangladeshi National Board of Revenue cancelled Cotecna's certificate for serious irregularities, while importers' complaints about the other three PSI companies mounted. Bangladesh planned to have its customs department train its officials in "WTO valuation, trade policy, ASYCUDA system, risk management" to take over the inspections.

Cotecna was also found to have bribed Pakistan's prime minister Benazir Bhutto to secure a PSI contract by Pakistani importers. She and her husband were sentenced both in Pakistan and Switzerland.

By continent

Europe

Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, Belgium

A network of banks, stock traders and top lawyers has obtained billions from the European treasuries through suspected fraud and speculation with dividend tax. The five hardest hit countries have lost together at least $62.9 billion. Germany is the hardest hit country, with around €31 billion withdrawn from the German treasury. Estimated losses for other countries include at least €17 billion for France, €4.5 billion in Italy, €1.7 billion in Denmark and €201 million for Belgium.

Greece

Scandinavia

A paper by economists Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen and Gabriel Zucman, which used data from HSBC Switzerland (“Swiss leaks”) and Mossack Fonseca (“Panama Papers”), found that "on average about 3% of personal taxes are evaded in Scandinavia, but this figure rises to about 30% in the top 0.01% of the wealth distribution... Taking tax evasion into account increases the rise in inequality seen in tax data since the 1970s markedly, highlighting the need to move beyond tax data to capture income and wealth at the top, even in countries where tax compliance is generally high. We also find that after reducing tax evasion—by using tax amnesties—tax evaders do not legally avoid taxes more. This result suggests that fighting tax evasion can be an effective way to collect more tax revenue from the ultra-wealthy."

United Kingdom

Poster issued by the British tax authorities to counter offshore tax evasion.

HMRC, the UK tax collection agency, estimated that in the tax year 2016–17, pure tax evasion (i.e. not including things like hidden economy or criminal activity) cost the government £5.3 billion. This compared to a wider tax gap (the difference between the amount of tax that should, in theory, be collected by HMRC, against what is actually collected) of £33 billion in the same year, an amount that represented 5.7% of liabilities. At the same time, tax avoidance was estimated at £1.7 billion (this does not include international tax arrangements that cannot be challenged under the UK law, including some forms of base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS)).

In 2013, the Coalition government announced a crackdown on economic crime. It created a new criminal offence for aiding tax evasion and removed the requirement for tax investigation authorities to prove "intent to evade tax" to prosecute offenders.

In 2015, Chancellor George Osborne promised to collect £5bn by "waging war" on tax evaders by announcing new powers for HMRC to target people with offshore bank accounts. The number of people prosecuted for tax evasion doubled in 2014/15 from the year before to 1,258.

United States

In the United States of America, Federal tax evasion is defined as the purposeful, illegal attempt to evade the assessment or the payment of a tax imposed by federal law. Conviction of tax evasion may result in fines and imprisonment.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has identified small businesses and sole proprietors as the largest contributors to the tax gap between what Americans owe in federal taxes and what the federal government receives. Small businesses and sole proprietorships contribute to the tax gap because there are few ways for the government to know about skimming or non-reporting of income without mounting significant investigations.

As of 2007 the most common means of tax evasion was overstatement of charitable contributions, particularly church donations.

Estimates of lost government revenue

The IRS estimates that the 2001 tax gap was $345 billion and for 2006 it was $450 billion. A study of the 2008 tax gap found a range of $450–$500 billion, and unreported income to be about $2 trillion, concluding that 18 to 19 percent of total reportable income was not being properly reported to the IRS.

Tax evasion and inequality

Generally, individuals tend to evade taxes, while companies rather avoid taxes. There is a great heterogenic among people who evade people as it is a substantial issue in society, that is creating an excessive tax gap. Studies suggest that the 8% of global financial wealth lies in offshore accounts. Often, offshore wealth that is stored in tax havens stays undetected in random audits. Even though there is high diversity among people who evade taxes, there is a higher probability among the highest wealth group. According to Alstadsæter, Johannesen and Zucman 2019 the extend of taxes evaded is substantially higher with higher income, and exceptionally higher among people of the top wealth group. In line with this, the probability to appear in the Panama Papers rises significantly among the top 0.01% of the wealth group, as does the probability to own an unreported account at HSBC. However, the upper wealth group is also more inclined to use tax amnesty.

See also

 

Tax avoidance

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tax avoidance is the legal usage of the tax regime in a single territory to one's own advantage to reduce the amount of tax that is payable by means that are within the law. A tax shelter is one type of tax avoidance, and tax havens are jurisdictions that facilitate reduced taxes.

Forms of tax avoidance that use tax laws in ways not intended by governments may be considered legal but are almost never considered moral in the court of public opinion and rarely are in journalism. Many corporations and businesses that take part in the practice experience a backlash from their active customers or online. Conversely, benefitting from tax laws in ways that were intended by governments is sometimes referred to as tax planning. The World Bank's World Development Report 2019 on the future of work supports increased government efforts to curb tax avoidance as part of a new social contract focused on human capital investments and expanded social protection.

"Tax mitigation", "tax aggressive", "aggressive tax avoidance" or "tax neutral" schemes generally refer to multiterritory schemes that fall into the grey area between common and well-accepted tax avoidance, such as purchasing municipal bonds in the United States, and tax evasion but are widely viewed as unethical, especially if they are involved in profit-shifting from high-tax to low-tax territories and territories recognised as tax havens. Since 1995, trillions of dollars have been transferred from OECD and developing countries into tax havens using these schemes.

Laws known as a General Anti-Avoidance Rule (GAAR) statutes, which prohibit "aggressive" tax avoidance, have been passed in several countries and regions including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Norway, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. In addition, judicial doctrines have accomplished the similar purpose, notably in the United States through the "business purpose" and "economic substance" doctrines established in Gregory v. Helvering and in the United Kingdom in Ramsay. The specifics may vary according to jurisdiction, but such rules invalidate tax avoidance that is technically legal but is not for a business purpose or is in violation of the spirit of the tax code.

The term "avoidance" has also been used in the tax regulations of some jurisdictions to distinguish tax avoidance foreseen by the legislators from tax avoidance exploiting loopholes in the law such as like-kind exchanges. The US Supreme Court has stated, "The legal right of an individual to decrease the amount of what would otherwise be his taxes or altogether avoid them, by means which the law permits, cannot be doubted".

Tax evasion, on the other hand, is the general term for efforts by individuals, corporations, trusts and other entities to evade taxes by illegal means. Both tax evasion and some forms of tax avoidance can be viewed as forms of tax noncompliance, as they describe a range of activities that are unfavourable to a state's tax system.

According to Joseph Stiglitz (1986), there are three principles of tax avoidance: postponement of taxes, tax arbitrage across individuals facing different tax brackets, and tax arbitrage across income streams facing different tax treatment. Many tax avoidance devices include a combination of the three principles.

The postponement of taxes is the present discounted value of postponed tax is much less than of a tax currently paid. Tax arbitrage across individuals facing different tax brackets or the same individual facing different marginal tax rates at different times is an effective method of reducing tax liabilities within a family. However, according to Stiglitz (1986), differential tax rates may also lead to transactions among individuals in different brackets leading to “tax induced transactions”. The last principle is the tax arbitrage across income streams facing different tax treatment.

Anti-avoidance measures

An anti-avoidance measure is a rule that prevents the reduction of tax by legal arrangements, where those arrangements are put in place purely to reduce tax, and would not otherwise be regarded as a reasonable course of action.

Legislative Measures

Two kind of anti-avoidance measures exist; General Anti Avoidance Rules (GAAR) and Specific Anti Avoidance Rules (SAAR). The GAAR implies a set of generic anti-avoidance rules, while SAAR targets a specific avoidance practice or technique. Also, there is a set of bilateral measures pursued thorough treaties or double taxation agreements (DTAAs), this can be done via various clauses.

Judicial Anti-Avoidance Measures

Courts around the world have played an important role in developing SAAR and GAAR measures. But the two guiding principles in judicial anti-avoidance are business purpose rule and substance over form rule. The business purpose rule states that the transaction must serve as a business purpose. Which means that mere tax advantage cannot be the main business purpose. On the other hand, the substance over form principle is wider than the business rule and it is defined by the OECD as the ‘prevalence of economic or social reality over the literal wording of legal provisions’ (Ostwal, T.P.; Vijayaraghavan, Vikram 2010).

EU Anti-Tax Avoidance Package

The Anti-Tax Avoidance Package is part of the European Commission's agenda as an effort to implement a more effective corporate taxation in the European Union. This package was implemented in 2016 and offers measures to prevent aggressive tax planning and encourage of tax transparency among others. The Anti- Tax Avoidance Package counts with an Anti-Tax avoidance directive, recommendation on Tax Treaties, revised administrative cooperation directive and communication on external strategy.

Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive (ATAD): On 20 June 2016 the European Council adopted the Directive (EU) 2016/1164 which contains five legally binding anti-abuse measures that should be applied as common forms of aggressive tax legislations. The member States must have applied these measures as from 1 January 2019. ATAD contains the following five anti-abuse measures: 1. Interest deductibility, to discourage artificial debt arrangements which are design to minimise taxes, 2. Exit taxation, for preventing the avoidance of taxes when companies are re-locating assets, 3. Incorporation of the GAAR for disregarding of non-genuine arrangements, 4. Controlled Foreign Company Rule (CFC), to deter that the profit is transferred to a low or no tax country, 5. Switchover rule, to prevent double non-taxation.

Anti- Avoidance Measures by Country

Australia

Australia has a strong tax regime regarding avoidance which applies to large corporate groups, underpinned by the General Anti- Avoidance Rule (GAAR) adopted since 1981 with the Income Tax Act. The multinational anti-avoidance law (MAAL) is an extension of Australia's general anti-avoidance rules. This aims to make multinational enterprises pay their fair share of tax of the profits received and earned in Australia. 

United States

Since 1980s there have been six major tax reforms in the US. The first one, in 1981, introduced a variety of tax loopholes. With this, the tax shelter industry boomed, giving rise to a demand for tax reform. The 1986 tax reform was the most accurate attempt at reducing tax avoidance, but then the next reforms of 1993 and 1997 opened new opportunities for tax avoidance and increased incentives of tax avoidance. The 1986 tax law reduced the demand for tax shelters and the opportunities for tax avoidance by constricting the gap between regular rates and the minimum tax rates. Lowering the top marginal rates, restricting the ability to use losses on just one type of income for balancing gains on other income and finally by taxing capital gains with full rates. There was another tax act in 1993, in which the alternative minimum tax rates were increased, also the regular rates, and an increase in the absolute gap for upper-income people. In the 1997 act, a gap between the rates at which capital gains and ordinary income was introduced to all taxpayers. During the 2001 and 2003 tax acts introduced more opportunities for tax avoidance because the gap between the capital gains and ordinary income tax remained the same as both rates were reduced by 5%. Finally, in the 2013 tax act, increased the tax on capital gains and ordinary income to 20 and 39.6% respectively.

Methods

Country of residence

A company may choose to avoid taxes by establishing their company or subsidiaries in an offshore jurisdiction (see offshore company and offshore trust). Individuals may also avoid tax by moving their tax residence to a tax haven, such as Monaco, or by becoming a perpetual traveler. They may also reduce their tax by moving to a country with lower tax rates.

However, a small number of countries tax their citizens on their worldwide income regardless of where they reside. As of 2012, only the United States and Eritrea have such a practice, whilst Finland, France, Hungary, Italy and Spain apply it in limited circumstances. In cases such as the US, taxation cannot be avoided by simply transferring assets or moving abroad.

The United States is unlike almost all other countries in that its citizens and permanent residents are subject to U.S. federal income tax on their worldwide income even if they reside temporarily or permanently outside the United States. U.S. citizens therefore cannot avoid U.S. taxes simply by emigrating from the U.S. According to Forbes magazine some citizens choose to give up their United States citizenship rather than be subject to the U.S. tax system; but U.S. citizens who reside (or spend long periods of time) outside the U.S. may be able to exclude some salaried income earned overseas (but not other types of income unless specified in a bilateral tax treaty) from income in computing the U.S. federal income tax. The 2015 limit on the amount that can be excluded is US$100,800. In addition, taxpayers can exclude or deduct certain foreign housing amounts. They may also be entitled to exclude from income the value of meals and lodging provided by their employer. Some American parents don't register their children's birth abroad with American authorities, because they do not want their children to be required to report all earnings to the IRS and pay American taxes for their entire lives, even if they never visit the United States.

Double taxation

Most countries impose taxes on income earned or gains realized within that country regardless of the country of residence of the person or firm. Most countries have entered into bilateral double taxation treaties with many other countries to avoid taxing nonresidents twice—once where the income is earned and again in the country of residence (and perhaps, for U.S. citizens, taxed yet again in the country of citizenship)—however, there are relatively few double-taxation treaties with countries regarded as tax havens. To avoid tax, it is usually not enough to simply move one's assets to a tax haven. One must also personally move to a tax haven (and, for U.S. citizens, renounce one's citizenship) to avoid tax.

Legal entities

Without changing country of residence (or, if a U.S. citizen, without giving up one's citizenship), personal taxation may be legally avoided by the creation of a separate legal entity to which one's property is donated. The separate legal entity is often a company, trust, or foundation. These may also be located offshore, such as in the case of many private foundations. Assets are transferred to the new company or trust so that gains may be realized, or income earned, within this legal entity rather than earned by the original owner. If assets are later transferred back to an individual, then capital gains taxes would apply on all profits. Also income tax would still be due on any salary or dividend drawn from the legal entity.

For a settlor (creator of a trust) to avoid tax there may be restrictions on the type, purpose and beneficiaries of the trust. For example, the settlor of the trust may not be allowed to be a trustee or even a beneficiary and may thus lose control of the assets transferred and/or may be unable to benefit from them.

Legal vagueness

Tax results depend on definitions of legal terms which are usually vague. For example, vagueness of the distinction between "business expenses" and "personal expenses" is of much concern for taxpayers and tax authorities. More generally, any term of tax law has a vague penumbra, and is a potential source of tax avoidance.

Tax shelters

Tax shelters are investments that allow, and purport to allow, a reduction in one's income tax liability. Although things such as home ownership, pension plans, and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) can be broadly considered "tax shelters", insofar as funds in them are not taxed, provided that they are held within the Individual Retirement Account for the required amount of time, the term "tax shelter" was originally used to describe primarily certain investments made in the form of limited partnerships, some of which were deemed by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service to be abusive.

The Internal Revenue Service and the United States Department of Justice have recently teamed up to crack down on abusive tax shelters. In 2003 the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held hearings about tax shelters which are entitled U.S. tax shelter industry: the role of accountants, lawyers, and financial professionals. Many of these tax shelters were designed and provided by accountants at the large American accounting firms.

Examples of U.S. tax shelters include: Foreign Leveraged Investment Program (FLIP) and Offshore Portfolio Investment Strategy (OPIS). Both were devised by partners at the accounting firm, KPMG. These tax shelters were also known as "basis shifts" or "defective redemptions."

Prior to 1987, passive investors in certain limited partnerships (such as oil exploration or real estate investment ventures) were allowed to use the passive losses (if any) of the partnership (i.e., losses generated by partnership operations in which the investor took no material active part) to offset the investors' income, lowering the amount of income tax that otherwise would be owed by the investor. These partnerships could be structured so that an investor in a high tax bracket could obtain a net economic benefit from partnership-generated passive losses.

In the Tax Reform Act of 1986 the U.S. Congress introduced the limitation (under 26 U.S.C. § 469) on the deduction of passive losses and the use of passive activity tax credits. The 1986 Act also changed the "at risk" loss rules of 26 U.S.C. § 465. Coupled with the hobby loss rules (26 U.S.C. § 183), the changes greatly reduced tax avoidance by taxpayers engaged in activities only to generate deductible losses.

Transfer mispricing

Fraudulent transfer pricing, sometimes called transfer mispricing, also known as transfer pricing manipulation, refers to trade between related parties at prices meant to manipulate markets or to deceive tax authorities.

For example, if company A, a food grower in Africa, processes its produce through three subsidiaries: X (in Africa), Y (in a tax haven, usually offshore financial centers) and Z (in the United States). Now, Company X sells its product to Company Y at an artificially low price, resulting in a low profit and a low tax for Company X based in Africa. Company Y then sells the product to Company Z at an artificially high price, almost as high as the retail price at which Company Z would sell the final product in the U.S.. Company Z, as a result, would report a low profit and, therefore, a low tax. About 60% of capital flight from Africa is from improper transfer pricing. Such capital flight from the developing world is estimated at ten times the size of aid it receives and twice the debt service it pays.

The African Union reports estimates that about 30% of Sub-Saharan Africa's GDP has been moved to tax havens. Solutions include corporate “country-by-country reporting” where corporations disclose activities in each country and thereby prohibit the use of tax havens where real economic activity occurs.

Tax avoiders

United Kingdom

HMRC, the UK tax collection agency, estimated that the overall cost of tax avoidance in the UK in 2016-17 was £1.7 billion, of which £0.7 billion was loss of income tax, National Insurance contributions and Capital Gains Tax. The rest came from loss of Corporation Tax, VAT and other direct taxes. This compares to the wider tax gap (the difference between the amount of tax that should, in theory, be collected by HMRC, against what is actually collected) in that year of £33 billion.

Figures published by the Tax Justice Network show that the UK had one of the lowest rates of tax losses due to profit shifting by multinational companies, with the fourth lowest rate out of 102 countries studied. According to the figures, the UK lost £1 billion from profit shifting, around 0.04% of its GDP, coming behind Botswana (0.02%), Ecuador (0.02%) and Sweden (0.004%).

Large companies accused of tax avoidance

In 2008 it was reported by Private Eye that Tesco utilized offshore holding companies in Luxembourg and partnership agreements to reduce corporation tax liability by up to £50 million a year. Another scheme previously identified by Private Eye involved depositing £1 billion in a Swiss partnership, and then loaning out that money to overseas Tesco stores, so that profit can be transferred indirectly through interest payments. This scheme is reported to remain in operation and is estimated to be costing the UK exchequer up to £20 million a year in corporation tax.

In 2011, ActionAid reported that 25% of the FTSE 100 companies avoided taxation by locating their subsidiaries in tax havens. This increased to 98% when using the stricter US Congress definition of tax haven and bank secrecy jurisdictions. In 2016, it was reported in the Private Eye current affairs magazine that four out of the FTSE top 10 companies paid no corporation tax at all.

Tax avoidance by corporations came to national attention in 2012, when MPs singled out Google, Amazon.com and Starbucks for criticism. Following accusations that the three companies were diverting hundreds of millions of pounds in UK profits to secretive tax havens, there was widespread outrage across the UK, followed by boycotts of products by Google, Amazon.com and Starbucks. Following the boycotts and damage to brand image, Starbucks promised to move its tax base from the Netherlands to London and to pay HMRC £20million, but executives from Amazon.com and Google defended their tax avoidance as being within the law.

Google has remained the subject of criticism in the UK regarding their use of the 'Double Irish', Dutch Sandwich and Bermuda Black Hole tax avoidance schemes. Similarly, Amazon remains the subject of criticism across the UK and EU for its tax avoidance. In October 2017, the EU ordered Amazon to repay €250 million in illegal state aid to Luxembourg following a 'sweetheart deal' between Luxembourg and Amazon.com enabling the American company to artificially reduce its tax bill. PayPal, EBay, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook have also been found to be using the Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich schemes. Up to 1,000 individuals in the same year were also discovered to be using K2 to avoid tax.

Other UK active corporations mentioned in relation to tax avoidance in 2015, particularly the Double Irish, Dutch Sandwich and Bermuda Black Hole:

Other corporations mentioned in relation to tax avoidance in later years have been Vodafone, AstraZeneca, SABMiller, GlaxoSmithKline and British American Tobacco.

Tax avoidance has not always related to corporation tax. A number of companies including Tesco, Sainsbury's, WH Smith, Boots and Marks and Spencer used a scheme to avoid VAT by forcing customers paying by card to unknowingly pay a 2.5% 'card transaction fee', though the total charged to the customer remained the same. Such schemes came to light after HMRC litigated against Debenhams over the scheme during 2005.

Africa lost at least $50 million in taxes. This is more than the amount of foreign development aid. European companies operating in Africa aren't all that different from the actions of US companies such as Google, Apple and Amazon do not pay enough taxes because of tax avoidance.

According to the Independent Commission for International Corporate Tax Reform (ICRICT), the ‘GAFA’ (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) belong to the worst tax offenders worldwide. In 2018, Amazon was not charged any corporate taxes in the US for two years in a row, despite its doubling profits. Other multinationals, such as Apple for example, also exploit fiscal loopholes, diverting profits from high tax countries into others with lower corporate tax rates. As these large Internet companies disproportionally profit from the COVID-19 crisis, and the US federal government no longer participates in international corporate taxation agreements, single countries and trading zones are urged to implement fair taxation schemes for these Internet giants.

General anti-avoidance rule

Since the late 1990s, New Labour consulted on a "general anti-avoidance rule" (GAAR) for taxation, before deciding against the idea. By 2003, public interest in a GAAR surged as evidence of the scale of tax avoidance used by individuals in the financial and other sectors became apparent, though in its 2004 Budget the Labour Government announced a new "disclosure regime" as an alternative, whereby tax avoidance schemes would be required to be disclosed to the revenue departments.

In December 2010, the new Coalition government commissioned a report which would consider whether there should be a general anti-avoidance rule for the UK, which recommended that the UK should introduce such a rule, which was introduced in 2013. The rule prevents the reduction of tax by legal arrangements, where those arrangements are put in place purely to reduce tax, and would not otherwise be regarded as a reasonable course of action.

Following the Panama Papers leak in 2016, Private Eye, The Guardian and other British media outlets noted that Edward Troup, who became executive chair of HM Revenue and Customs, had worked with Simmons & Simmons in 2004 representing corporate tax havens and opposed the GAAR in 1998.

Public sector appointments

In January 2012 a review of the tax arrangements of people engaged on public sector appointments was undertaken, in order to "ascertain the extent of arrangements which could allow public sector appointees to minimise their tax payments" and make recommendations accordingly. The review was published on 23 May 2012, advising that:

  • the most senior staff in public sector appointments should be on the payroll, unless there are exceptional temporary circumstances;
  • through their contracting, departments must be able to seek formal assurance from contractors with off payroll arrangements lasting more than six months and costing over £220 per day that income tax and national insurance obligations were being met. Departments were advised to terminate a contract if that assurance was not provided;
  • implementation would be monitored carefully with financial sanctions for departments which did not comply.

Historical tax avoidance

Window tax
Avoiding the window tax in England

One historic example of tax avoidance still evident today was the payment of window tax. It was introduced in England and Wales in 1696 with the aim of imposing tax on the relative prosperity of individuals without the controversy of introducing an income tax. The bigger the house, the more windows it was likely to have, and the more tax the occupants would pay. Nevertheless, the tax was unpopular, because it was seen by some as a "tax on light" (leading to the phrase daylight robbery) and led property owners to block up windows to avoid it. The tax was repealed in 1851.

Deliberate roof destruction

Other historic examples of tax avoidance were the deliberate destructions of roofs in Scotland to avoid substantial property taxes. The roof of Slains Castle was removed in 1925, and the building has deteriorated since. The owners of Fetteresso Castle (now restored) deliberately destroyed their roof after World War II in protest at the new taxes.

United States

An IRS report indicates that, in 2009, 1,470 individuals earning more than $1,000,000 annually faced a net tax liability of zero or less. Also, in 1998 alone, a total of 94 corporations faced a net liability of less than half the full 35% corporate tax rate and the corporations Lyondell Chemical, Texaco, Chevron, CSX, Tosco, PepsiCo, Owens & Minor, Pfizer, JP Morgan, Saks, Goodyear, Ryder, Enron, Colgate-Palmolive, Worldcom, Eaton, Weyerhaeuser, General Motors, El Paso Energy, Westpoint Stevens, MedPartners, Phillips Petroleum, McKesson and Northrop Grumman all had net negative tax liabilities. Additionally, this phenomenon was widely documented regarding General Electric in early 2011.

Furthermore, a Government Accountability Office study found that, from 1998 to 2005, 55 percent of United States companies paid no federal income taxes during at least one year in a seven-year period it studied. A review in 2011 by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy of companies in the Fortune 500 profitable every year from 2008 through 2010 stated these companies paid an average tax rate of 18.5% and that 30 of these companies actually had a negative income tax due.

In 2012, Hewlett-Packard lost a lawsuit with the IRS over a "foreign tax credit generator" which was engineered by a division of AIG. Al Jazeera also wrote in 2012 that "Rich individuals and their families have as much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens, representing up to $280bn in lost income tax revenues ... John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network told Al Jazeera that he was shocked by 'the sheer scale of the figures'. ... 'We're talking about very big, well-known brands – HSBC, Citigroup, Bank of America, UBS, Credit Suisse ... and they do it knowing fully well that their clients, more often than not, are evading and avoiding taxes.' Much of this activity, Christensen added, was illegal."

As a result of the tax sheltering, the government responded with Treasury Department Circular 230. In 2010, the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 codified the "economic substance" rule of Gregory v. Helvering (1935).

The US Public Interest Research Group said in 2014 that the United States government loses roughly $184 billion per year due to corporations such as Pfizer, Microsoft and Citigroup using offshore tax havens to avoid paying US taxes. According to PIRG:

  • Pfizer paid no US income taxes 2010–2012, despite earning $43 billion. The corporation received more than $2 billion in federal tax refunds. In 2013, Pfizer operated 128 subsidiaries in tax havens and had $69 billion offshore which could not be collected by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS);
  • Microsoft maintains five tax haven subsidiaries and held $76.4 billion overseas in 2013, thus saving the corporation $24.4 billion in taxes;
  • Citigroup maintained 21 subsidiaries in tax haven countries in 2013, and kept $43.8 billion in offshore jurisdictions, thus saving the corporation an additional $11.7 billion in taxes.

According to an analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, global companies in the US are paying an effective tax rate of about negative 9 percent per annum.

An investigation by ProPublica published in 2021 based on leaked IRS documents revealed techniques by which billionaires accumulated massive wealth while paying lower rates than middle-income people, or no tax, or in some cases getting paid refundable childcare tax credits.  These include:

  • Instead of a salary taxed at the 37% top rate, accepting stock, which is taxed at the 20% capital gains rate.
  • Avoid paying tax on capital gains with the "buy, borrow, die" technique:
    • Buy or earn capital assets like stocks and real estate, and then never sell because assets do not count as income until sold.
    • Using capital assets as collateral to borrow spending money at interest rates considerably lower than the tax rate; loans are not taxed as income.
    • Holding capital assets until after death, when a "step-up in basis" zeroes out the accumulated gains and allows heirs to not pay any capital gains tax.
  • Avoid the estate tax by moving money into trusts or charitable foundations before death
  • Offset dividend income with the interest paid on loans, or relying on increasing stock prices instead of a dividend
  • Offset income with "paper" losses in business operations
  • Offset income with charitable contributions

Public opinion

Tax avoidance may be considered to be the dodging of one's duties to society, or alternatively the right of every citizen to structure one's affairs in a manner allowed by law, to pay no more tax than what is required. Attitudes vary from approval through neutrality to outright hostility. Attitudes may vary depending on the steps taken in the avoidance scheme, or the perceived unfairness of the tax being avoided.

In 2008, the charity Christian Aid published a report, Death and taxes: the true toll of tax dodging, which criticised tax exiles and tax avoidance by some of the world's largest companies, linking tax evasion to the deaths of millions of children in developing countries. However the research behind these calculations has been questioned in a 2009 paper prepared for the UK Department for International Development. According to the Financial Times there is a growing trend for charities to prioritise tax avoidance as a key campaigning issue, with policy makers across the world considering changes to make tax avoidance more difficult.

In 2010, tax avoidance became a hot-button issue in the UK. An organisation, UK Uncut, began to encourage people to protest at local high-street shops that were thought to be avoiding tax, such as Vodafone, Topshop and the Arcadia Group.

In 2012, during the Occupy movement in the United States, tax avoidance for the 99% was proposed as a protest tool.

Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting at the Essex Business School (University of Essex) and scientific advisor of the Tax Justice Network pointed to a discrepancy between the Corporate Social Responsibility claims of multinational companies and “their internal dynamics aimed at maximising their profits through things like tax avoidance”. He wrote in an article commenting the Lux Leaks publications: “Big corporations and accountancy firms are engaged in organised hypocrisy.”

Fair Tax Mark

As a response to public opinion regarding tax avoidance, the Fair Tax Mark was established in the UK during 2014 as an independent certification scheme to identify and recognise companies which pay taxes "in accordance with the spirit of all tax laws" and not to use options, allowances, or reliefs, or undertake specific transactions, "that are contrary to the spirit of the law".

The Mark is operated by a not-for-profit community benefit society, the Fair Tax Foundation.

Awardees of this mark include The Co-op, SSE, Go-Ahead Group, Ecology Building Society, Lush Cosmetics, Richer Sounds, Scottish Water, United Utilities, Marshalls, several large regional co-operatives (East of England, Midcounties, Scotmid) and The Phone Co-op.

Government and judicial response

Countries with politicians, public officials or close associates implicated in the Panama Papers leak on April 15, 2016

Tax avoidance reduces government revenue, so governments with a stricter anti-avoidance stance seek to prevent tax avoidance or keep it within limits. The obvious way to do this is to frame tax rules so that there is a smaller scope for avoidance. In practice this has not always been achievable and has led to an ongoing battle between governments amending legislation and tax advisors finding new scope/loopholes for tax avoidance in the amended rules.

To allow prompter response to tax avoidance schemes, the US Tax Disclosure Regulations (2003) require prompter and fuller disclosure than previously required, a tactic which was applied in the UK in 2004.

Some countries such as Canada, Australia, United Kingdom and New Zealand have introduced a statutory General Anti-Avoidance Rule (or General Anti-Abuse Rule, GAAR). Canada also uses Foreign Accrual Property Income rules to obviate certain types of tax avoidance. In the United Kingdom many provisions of the tax legislation (known as "anti-avoidance" provisions) apply to prevent tax avoidance where the main object (or purpose), or one of the main objects (or purposes), of a transaction is to enable tax advantages to be obtained.

In the United States, the Internal Revenue Service distinguishes some schemes as "abusive" and therefore illegal. The Alternative Minimum Tax was developed to reduce the impact of certain tax avoidance schemes. Furthermore, while tax avoidance is in principle legal, if the IRS in its sole judgment determines that tax avoidance is the 'principal purpose' for an expatriation attempt, 'covered expat' status will be applied to the requester, thereby forcing an expatriation tax on worldwide assets to be paid as a condition of expatriation. The IRS presumes a principal purpose of tax avoidance if a taxpayer requesting expatriation has a net worth of $622,000 or more, or has had more than $124,000 in average annual net income tax over the 5 tax years ending before the date of expatriation.

United Kingdom

In the UK, judicial doctrines to prevent tax avoidance began in IRC v Ramsay (1981) which decided that where a transaction has pre-arranged artificial steps that serve no commercial purpose other than to save tax, the proper approach is to tax the effect of the transaction as a whole. This is known as the Ramsay principle and this case was followed by Furniss v. Dawson (1984) which extended the Ramsay principle. This approach has been rejected in most Commonwealth jurisdictions even in those where UK cases are generally regarded as persuasive. After two decades, there have been numerous decisions, with inconsistent approaches, and both the Revenue authorities and professional advisors remain quite unable to predict outcomes. For this reason this approach can be seen as a failure or at best only partly successful.

In the judiciary, different judges have taken different attitudes. As a generalisation, for example, judges in the United Kingdom before the 1970s regarded tax avoidance with neutrality; but nowadays they may regard aggressive tax avoidance with increasing hostility.

In the UK in 2004, the Labour government announced that it would use retrospective legislation to counteract some tax avoidance schemes, and it has subsequently done so on a few occasions, notably BN66. Initiatives announced in 2010 suggest an increasing willingness on the part of HMRC to use retrospective action to counter avoidance schemes, even when no warning has been given.

The UK Government has pushed the initiative led by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on base erosion and profit shifting. In the 2015 Autumn Statement, Chancellor George Osborne announced that £800m would be spent on tackling tax avoidance in order to recover £5 billion a year by 2019–20. In addition, large companies will now have to publish their UK tax strategies and any large businesses that persistently engage in aggressive tax planning will be subject to special measures. With these policies, Osborne has claimed to be at the forefront of combating tax avoidance. However, he has been criticised over his perceived inaction on enacting policies set forth by the OECD to combat tax avoidance.

In April 2015, the Chancellor George Osborne announced a tax on diverted profits, quickly nicknamed the "Google Tax" by the press, designed to discourage large companies moving profits out of the UK to avoid tax. In 2016, Google agreed to pay back £130m of tax dating back to 2005 to HMRC, which said it was the "full tax due in law". However, this amount of tax has been criticised by Labour, with ex Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn saying that the rate of tax paid by Google only amounted to 3%. Former Liberal Democrat Business Secretary Vince Cable also said Google had "got off very, very lightly", and Osborne "made a fool of himself" by hailing the deal as a victory. Although claiming that it was "absurd" to lay blame onto Google for tax avoidance, saying that EU member states should "[compete] with each other to offer firms the lowest corporate tax rates", Conservative MP Boris Johnson said it was a "good thing" for corporations to pay more tax. However, Johnson said he did not want tax rates to go up or for European Union countries to do this in unison.

See also

General:

 

Religious cosmology

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