Taxing across Borders: Tracking Personal Wealth and Corporate Profits

TLDR: Tax avoidance is typically done within the letter of the law and thus would be best described as tax avoidance rather than fraud as discussed by the authors, and the costs of tax avoidance to foreign governments are difficult to quantify.

Abstract: Globalization is making it increasingly easy for corporations to shift profits to low-tax countries. Modern technology has also made it simpler for wealthy individuals to move funds to undeclared bank accounts in offshore tax havens. Both issues have featured prominently in the news and global economic debates since the financial crisis, but the arguments tend to be based on relatively little empirical evidence. Measuring the costs of tax havens to foreign governments is fraught with difficulties. However, balance of payments data and corporate filings show that US companies are shifting profits to Bermuda, Luxembourg, and similar countries on a large and growing scale. About 20 percent of all US corporate profits are now booked in such havens, a tenfold increase since the 1980s. This profit-shifting is typically done within the letter of the law and thus would be best described as tax avoidance rather than fraud. I attempt to quantify its cost for government coffers by taking a fresh look at the most recent macroeconomic evidence and combining it in a systematic manner. Over the last 15 years, the effective corporate tax rate of US companies has declined from 30 to 20 percent, and about two-thirds of this decline can be attributed to increased profit-shifting to low-tax jurisdictions. Wealthy individuals, too, use tax havens, sometimes legally—to benefit from banking services not available in their home country—and sometimes illegally—to evade taxes. A number of changes have sought, with some success, to curb that form of tax evasion over the last years. Yet the available evidence from Switzerland and