LAW41450

Tax, particularly international tax, has generated a high level of public discourse in the past decade. Witness the US Senate questioning Apple on its corporate structure involving subsidiaries in Ireland (May 2013), the chair of the UK Public Accounts Committee labelling Google as "calculated, unethical and evil" for its tax planning and the state aid investigation by the European Commission into the issue of whether multinational companies benefitted from favourable rulings from the tax authorities of Ireland, the Netherlands or Luxembourg.

Tax is central to business and individual decisions, and international tax is of pressing concern given the constraints of the nation state in the face of globalisation and cross-border business activities. International tax raises issues of formal law, soft law, legal interpretation, equality, constitutional issues and ethics. We will look at the involvement of the European Commission in the area of tax, the efforts by the OECD to tackle double taxation and, more recently, double non-taxation (e.g. the Base Erosion of Profits initiative of the OECD). We will contrast the approach taken by the United Nations and the OECD in the area of model bilateral double tax treaties. We will discuss whether the clampdown on international tax avoidance is the product of national protectionism by large member states or the nascent stirrings of an international tax order.