Global Tax Evasion Report 2024

[John Short]

Global Tax Evasion Report 2024

Authors: Annette Alstadsæter, Sarah Godar, Panayiotis Nicolaides, and Gabriel Zucman

Over the last 10 years, governments have launched major initiatives to reduce international tax evasion. Yet despite the importance of these developments, little is known about the effects of these new policies. Is global tax evasion falling or rising? Are new issues emerging, and if so, what are they? This report addresses these questions thanks to an unprecedented international research collaboration building on the work of more than 100 researchers globally.


From the Executive Summary:


"This report makes six recommendations to address the issues identified above. The common
theme of these recommendations is that they focus on reducing the tax deficit of multinational
companies and wealthy individuals. The tax deficits are the difference between what these actors
pay in taxes today and what they would pay if minimum taxes were well enforced. Reducing the
tax deficits of multinationals and wealthy individuals can not only generate large amounts of
government revenue, but also contribute to increasing the social sustainability of globalization.

Our proposals are the following:

1. Reform the international agreement on minimum corporate taxation to implement a rate
of 25% and remove the loophole in it that foster tax competition.

2. Introduce a new global minimum tax for the world’s billionaires equal to 2% of their
wealth.

3. Institute mechanisms to tax wealthy people who have been long-term residents in a
country and choose to move to a low-tax country.

4. Implement unilateral measures to collect some of the tax deficits of multinational
companies and billionaires in case global agreements on these issues fail.

5. Move towards the creation of a Global Asset Registry to better fight tax evasion.

6. Strengthen the application of economic substance and anti-abuse rules."


https://www.taxobservatory.eu//www-site/uploads/2023/10/global_tax_evasion_report_24.pdf

[John Short]

In 2012 the famous French actor Gérard Depardieu moved his home across the border to Belgium to avoid paying a hefty surtax on incomes over 1 million euros. The ease with which Depardieu avoided taxes made international news. A young French economist named Gabriel Zucman followed the events with avid interest, as he had recently written his master’s thesis at the Paris School of Economics (PSE) on how tax rates affect flight by the superrich. 

Fast-forward to July 2024, when the Group of 20 countries (G20) discussed a proposal for a global minimum tax on the world’s 3,000 billionaires. Coordination across countries would ensure that the superrich could not simply pull a Depardieu by fleeing to a different country. The blueprint for the G20 proposal was drawn up by a still-young Gabriel Zucman. 

In the less than two decades since his master’s thesis, the 37-year-old Zucman has established himself as one of the world’s leading experts on measuring incomes and wealth, and on how—and how much—to tax very rich people and corporations. “We have to fix the mistakes we’ve made in taxing the superrich, not simply throw up our hands and give them a free pass,” Zucman told F&D. 

Read in
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/2024/09/people-in-economics-scourge-of-the-rich-loungani?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery