Abstract
This paper offers an overview of many of the issues that a grand unified global income tax (GUGIT) raises and explains why current global trends suggest that most of those issues no longer are a barrier to adoption of a GUGIT. The paper does not provide a detailed GUGIT proposal but builds on the work of the CCCTB WG and its detailed proposal for a CCCTB. Part II of this paper defines the GUGIT concept and describes its contours and limitations. Part III confronts the critical issue of national sovereignty under a centralized reporting and collection system. Part III also addresses incentivizing countries to accommodate a GUGIT as well as the more general considerations of the relinquishment of personal freedom that would be essential to the successful operation of the GUGIT. Part IV reviews several of the technical objections to a GUGIT including the methodology for allocating and apportioning income among jurisdictions, currency conversions, and accounting and language translation matters. Part V argues that international agreement to a uniform set of tax rules is not quite so unattainable as it might seem because national tax laws tend to converge internationally in any event. Nations increasingly borrow successful elements from the tax laws of other countries and follow the models that other nations establish. Part VI concerns itself with the economic displacements and revenue losses that are likely to arise from transition to a GUGIT. Part VII concludes that economic globalization has created the conditions essential to development of a global tax system. Converging income tax rules internationally make it possible to negotiate uniform rules, while acceptance of international cooperation on information sharing in tax matters has become sufficiently established and essential to preventing tax avoidance, so national sovereignty as a barrier to a GUGIT quickly is weakening. A GUGIT, while utopian (or dystopian if the GUGIT would limit the taxpayer’s planning opportunities), also may be possible so that development of a model and commencement of negotiations lies in the near, not distant, future.
Recommended Citation
Henry Ordower,
Utopian Visions Toward a Grand Unified Global Income Tax,
14 Fla. Tax Rev.
(2013).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/ftr/vol14/iss1/9