Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Globalization forces national economies to transform their structure in a more competable manner.
National Tax system is one of the important factors of this transformation period. After the economic liberalization period of 1980’s, Turkish Tax System stil remains an area which has not been fully transformed for the new economic order. Especially, it seems to be necessary to satisfy the expectations which are created by incresead tax competitation and to establish a suitable tax structure for free movement of capital, goods, services and workers and to provide a sustainable tax enviroment within international tax competitetion. A new tax structure is needed which is paralel to globalization trends.
Last year, in 2006, a new Turkish Cooparate Income Tax law was prepared and acted by parliament. In 2007, nowadays, Turkish Income Tax Law is being prepared. The acting process in parlaiment is going on. This paper aims to evalute the rewrite process of tax law in aspect of globalization and to determine what should be done for integrating to global world.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Replacing the Federal Income Tax with a VAT or a retail sales tax would amount to adopting a scheme under which the Federal government would become a forced joint investor in all private investments. Moreover, the taxpayer would choose the investment and the larger the private investment, the larger the government's forced participation. This is problematic because it helps wealthier investors scale up and gain entry to the highest return investments (hedge funds, IPOs, etc.) from which small savers are excluded.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The U.S. tax administration began a new era of enforcement by focusing on “cloned” tax shelters that were marketed by ambitious accounting and tax law firms to small groups of customers targeted because they had large capital gains from sales that could be sheltered by the promoted deals. That focus led to heightened transparency requirements­, new disclosure rules, higher standards for tax reporting, and stiffer penalties. Even the courts, which had seemed reluctant to apply judicial doctrines to stop aggressive tax structuring, have appeared to gain new backbone in this age of stiffer enforcement expectations. Just at the time when it appears that the heightened attention to tax shelter activity may reduce the amount of aggressive planning, the U.S. Patent Office has thrown a wrench into the machinery by issuing a series of patents on tax planning strategies, after the State Street decision that opened the way for business method patents.

The patenting of tax strategies may have significant effects well beyond the questions that are already the subject of discussion among tax practitioners and academics, such as royalties, liabilities for failure to advise about the existence of a patent, or difficulties of litigating against validity of a tax patent. There are concerns, in particular, that the ability to patent legal processes relating to tax liabilities may make it more difficult for taxpayers to comply with the law and may encourage taxpayers not to comply with the law. This paper will briefly review those concerns, and consider three additional issues: ethical questions for practitioners raised by tax patents, the potential impact of tax patents on the development of the underlying “tax minimization norm” that this author has noted in earlier papers as a significant factor in the increase in tax shelter activity, and whether patenting tax strategies may provide yet another mechanism for increasing harmful global tax competition among nations.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the 6th century at the threshold between the Roman antique to the Germanic influenced Middle Ages the bishop Gregor from Tours (Gregorius Turonensis) wrote his “Ten Books of Franconian History” (Decem Libri Historiae) as a chronicler and participating witness. The comparison of the roman tax practice and its administration with the legislative attempts of the Merovingian monarchs to meet their demand points not only to the differences between the Roman and Germanic understanding of law and between legality and arbitrariness. This comparison even makes clear which are the necessary constitutional prerequisites that Max Weber named in the Sociological Basic Terms (authority, control, association) and in his Sociology of Government (respect of legitimacy and bureaucratic administrative staff) in the 19th century.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper applies feminist perspectives to tax expenditure theory. It demonstrates that the current use of tax expenditure theory as a tool to determine if tax subsides are an effective way to deliver social programs is inadequate unless feminist theories are also taken into account. My case study is tax subsidies for retirement savings, the single largest tax expenditure in Canada. My conclusion is that it is only when gender, class and race are taken into account, can one see that these tax subsidies discriminate against women in favour of men and that they contribute directly to women’s economic insecurity in retirement.