CBS Tax Group

Seminar 1 - Religion, Religiosity and Tax

3 February 18.00-19.30 CET

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The presentation explores the effect of religion and religiosity on tax compliance decisions. It starts with an overview of the literature that explores the relationship between religion (specifically Islam), religiosity and tax compliance. Then it follows by presenting the findings of two studies of the author. The first work investigates the theoretical concerns of Religion and Religiosity over the concept of tax. Additionally, the qualitative study provides an in-depth understanding of the effects of knowledge of religion on tax compliance behaviour. In particular, findings shed a light on four critical issues for Muslim taxpayers, such as Effects of their Islamic stance on tax compliance; rightful due concerns of tax evasion behaviour; comparison of Zakat with taxes; and the intervention of Islamic scholars on the tax compliance decisions of Muslims. 

The second study (in progress) further investigates whether or not religiosity has a linear or a quadratic (u-shaped) relationship with tax compliance. The second paper analyses the religiosity effect by estimating a structural model using online survey data. The findings suggest that religiosity has a significant effect on both tax morale and tax compliance. Further, the relationship between religiosity and both tax morale and tax compliance is curvilinear. Additionally, the paper suggests that high levels of religiosity could discourage OMSCs to comply with the tax system.

Presenter: Recep Yucedogru (Assistant Professor in Law at Bülent Ecevit University)

Recep Yucedogru is Assistant Professor at Bulent Ecevit University, Turkey. He holds an MA in Fiscal Law, BA in Public Finance, and was awarded his Ph.D. in 2016 from the University of Nottingham on the topic of Understanding tax morale and tax compliance of owner-managers of small companies.  He also worked for the Turkish Revenue Administration between 2005 and 2009. 

He is teaching Tax Law and Public finance in the university. He is interested in tax behaviour and tax morale with a special interest in Religiosity, Tax Ethics, Evasion Behaviour and Tax Administration

Discussant: Yvette Lind (Assistant professor, Copenhagen Business School)

Yvette Lind is an Assistant professor in tax law at Copenhagen Business School as of 2019. She defended her doctoral thesis (“Crossing a Border” published by Jure) on taxation and social security contributions linked to cross-border working at Umeå University (Sweden) in 2017 and subsequently received a post-doc from the Swedish TOR/Skattenytt foundation (2017-2019). The post-doc project focused on the relationship between taxation and state aid law in an international setting, e.g. state aid investigations linked to multinational corporations and the design and application of environmental taxes. Currently exploring research questions concerning taxation and democracy. 

17 February 10.00-11.30 CET

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The impact of COVID-19 is at the moment undeniably extensive as the world faces the most severe recession in nearly a century. Economic emergency programs, the design and implementation of COVID-19 tax policies and subsequent state aid actions have been launched in many countries to mitigate the impact of the pandemic. Unlike previous economic recessions or financial crises, feminized sectors of the labor market, such as healthcare, education, care, retail, and client-facing services, which all are characterized by low-paid and multiple part-time jobs, seems to be hit the hardest by the pandemic. These sectors have, supported by emerging data, experienced higher job losses than traditionally male-dominated sectors and appears to be inadequately covered, by most financial state aid schemes at the moment. 

Women have, in comparison to men, also reduced their hours of work to care for, and home school, children. Aggregating already existing problems associated to both the loss of paid work hours and to the gender-segregated allocation of unpaid hours for household work and caring. The sudden closure of childcare programs and schools in many countries has had a crucial impact for women whose labour force participation depends on these institutions.[1] The possibility of several waves of the virus that could trigger additional childcare closures make it extremely likely that married women (in general when considering the current norm of heterosexual couples) in particular may be slower to re-enter the work force in the hope of protecting the (single-breadwinner) family income. 

This seminar will discuss existing gender gaps within various domestic tax systems and national tax policies. Even before the pandemic, domestic tax systems inherently worked against economic gender equality, despite impressive growth performances in many economies. Although most tax systems being utilizing a gender equal wording in its legislative texts, tax systems and fiscal policy decisions affect men and women differently when the legislative tax acts are factually applied. Therefore, many aspects of taxation have had an indirect but substantial effect on gender-related socioeconomic inequalities. These gender differences subsequently persist in not only employment rates but also general patterns and gender gaps in unpaid care work. As a result, employment rates, income, old age security, poverty and wealth are all closely linked to the allocative and distributional outcome of tax regulations. 

Moderator: Yvette Lind (Assistant professor, Copenhagen Business School)

Caroline Heber (Post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance)

Caroline Heber is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, Munich. Prior to this, she worked as a Research Fellow at the Ross Parsons Centre, University of Sydney and at the Department of Fiscal Law, University of Graz. In the fall semester of the academic year 2017-2018 Caroline was appointed as a Global Emile Noël Fellow at NYU School of Law. In 2020, she completed her post-doctoral thesis on the enhanced cooperation and European tax law at WU Vienna. Her area of expertise lies in the field of tax law, European Union law and European integration theory. 

Åsa Gunnarsson (Professor in Tax Law at Umeå University)

Åsa Gunnarsson serve as professor of tax law and jurisprudence at Umeå University. She started her career in tax administration but shifted to academia and a theoretical approach on tax issues. Her thesis on tax equity, published in 1995, became a part of the Nordic tax law doctrine. A visiting fellowship in Wellington, New Zealand, gave the entrance to international collaborations. She has initiated and participated in many networks that applies critical perspectives on the relationship between law and society. She is a founder of the generously granted network, Feminist Studies on Taxation and Budgeting (FemTax). The activities and publications initiated by FemTax have been a part of the evolving interest on the structural impact that tax laws have on gender equality. During 2015-2019 Åsa Gunnarsson coordinated a Horizon2020 project, titled Revisioning the ‘Fiscal EU’: Fair, Sustainable, and Coordinated Tax and Social Policies (FairTax). The project had an impressive dissemination output and a high impact among European stakeholders. Åsa Gunnarsson has written extensively on tax policy and the law, tax fairness, the tax/benefit interface, gender equality and taxation, social citizenship, and gender equality law. She has published in the academic format of scholarly articles and books, as well as columns, essays and reports. She is frequently invited to present papers, give lectures and participate in conferences outside Sweden. Her present research projects have quite diverging topics; a book on jurisprudence and legal dogmatics is in progress, as well as couple of articles on the relation between human rights, taxation, and gender equality from a global perspective. Her contribution to the CBS Tax Colloquium 2021will be based in an article in Tax Notes International, co-written with Yvette Lind.

Twitter: @gunnarsson_asa

Miranda Stewart (Professor in Tax Law at Melbourne Law School)

Miranda Stewart is Professor of Tax Law at Melbourne University Law School and an Honorary Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, where she works with the Tax and Transfer Policy Institute (TTPI). Miranda was the inaugural Director of TTPI from 2014 to 2017. Miranda researches, teaches and consults on a wide range of tax law, policy and budget topics in Australia and globally. Recent publications include the edited book Tax, Social Policy and Gender (2017, ANU Press). Miranda is a co-editor of Austaxpolicy.com blog and a frequent public commentator on tax and budgeting. Miranda was named as one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence in 2018.

Webpage

Twitter @AusTaxProf 

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Seminar 3 - Taxation, state-building and the constitution

3 March 18.00-19.30 CET

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What does it mean for tax to be treated as public law? This question is hardly new, but it is seldom addressed directly.  In some jurisdictions, it is so obvious that it is taken for granted.  Elsewhere, it is widely discussed but only in specific contexts such as constitutional adjudication or the exceptionalism debate.  It is argued in this paper that there are in fact three different reasons for analysing tax in public law terms.

First and most obviously, familiar public law disputes can engage in the tax field, for example in relation to the constitutionality and interpretation of tax legislation and the legality of tax administration.

Secondly, the securing of predictable public finances is essential to the establishment of a state and its survival and success thereafter.  As discussed in my recent book Tax, State Building and the Constitution, this is likely to inflect many aspects of tax law and administration and may explain some of the peculiarities (if not ‘exceptionalism’) of tax. 

Thirdly, public law theories are useful as framing devices, which organises our attitudes towards a series of vital questions: which aspects of the vast edifice of taxation are most worthy of notice; whether, how and the extent to which courts ought to intervene in tax administration; the relationship between national and international law; and the extent to which the insights of non-legal disciplines are relevant to identifying what the law is as well as what it ought to be.

These intersections between tax and public law are deeply familiar to tax specialists.  The first is of the essence in judicial review and constitutional review decisions.  The second is explored in the rich literatures on fiscal sociology, tax history, and tax and development.  The third is perhaps most obvious in the work of critical scholars whose central aim is to change our frame of reference and to highlight previously overlooked factors such as gender, race, and social deprivation.

It is argued in this paper that it would be particularly useful for tax specialists to become more familiar with the third, framing, role of public law.  This is because we have a distinct tendency to speak past each other on political, jurisdictional, disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, especially in relation to typical public law questions such as the relationship between taxpayers, benefits recipients and the state.  Public law theory does not answer these questions for us, but it does offer us a sophisticated map of the grounds on which we might disagree and how it might nevertheless be possible to engage with those who have different starting points from us.

The paper outlines various potential benefits of borrowing from public law this better sense of how to disagree, but one that is particularly close to my own interests is the possibility of drawing meaningful comparisons between the treatment of tax in various constitutions.  This is notoriously difficult in view of the tendency of constitutional law towards particularity, but is a worthwhile exercise even for the UK where our ‘unwritten’ (yet extensively documented) constitution obscures deep commonalities with the arrangements in other jurisdictions.  The key is to ensure that like is being compared to like, and once again we can gain invaluable assistance by drawing widely on general public law scholarship.

Presenter: Dominic de Cogan (Senior Lecturer in Tax Law at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge)

Dominic de Cogan is a member of the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge.  He worked as a Tax Consultant before completing a PhD in modern tax history, before joining the University of Birmingham and subsequently the University of Cambridge in an academic role.  His research interests centre on the interaction of tax and government, and his teaching responsibilities include tax law and administrative law.  He has visited Denmark once (a small town named Struer).

Discussant: Yvette Lind (Assistant professor, Copenhagen Business School)

Yvette Lind is an Assistant professor in tax law at Copenhagen Business School as of 2019. She defended her doctoral thesis (“Crossing a Border” published by Jure) on taxation and social security contributions linked to cross-border working at Umeå University (Sweden) in 2017 and subsequently received a post-doc from the Swedish TOR/Skattenytt foundation (2017-2019). The post-doc project focused on the relationship between taxation and state aid law in an international setting, e.g. state aid investigations linked to multinational corporations and the design and application of environmental taxes. Currently exploring research questions concerning taxation and democracy. 

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Twitter: @YsLind

17 March 18.00-19.30 CET

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Normative reasoning means, as stated by Kevin Michels, to ask the deep questions about “justice, fairness, and value that underlie our ordering of society”. These questions may as well be asked with a view to the norms and principles that underlie the international tax structure. Normative reasoning as a method to analyze what justice indeed requires often boils down to the question of “why?” Why should we apply a certain principle? Why should a certain principle be based on a reason and why is such a reason being considered to be normative? 

When discussing the most fundamental principles of (international) tax law, such as neutrality, equality among states, value creation, it is often difficult to pin down the reasons why a certain principle should indeed be considered valid. The colloquium will discuss the role that normative reasoning currently plays in (international) tax research and the role that it should play in view of the reform proposals that are currently on the table. 

Moderator: Yvette Lind (Assistant professor, Copenhagen Business School)

Johanna Stark (Post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance)

Johanna Stark is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance in Munich. She studied Philosophy at LMU Munich and at the University of Oxford, and also holds a law degree from LMU Munich. Her research interests are German and European private law, legal theory, and tax law. Her book on philosophical problems of regulatory competition (based on her Ph.D. thesis) was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. 

Peter Hongler (Professor in Tax Law at University of St. Gallen)

Peter Hongler is a Professor of Tax Law at the Law School, University of St. Gallen (Switzerland). Hongler´s research is largely focused on the concept of justice in the context of international taxation.

31 March 18.00-19.30 CET

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Moderator: Yvette Lind (Assistant professor, Copenhagen Business School)

Paper presenter: Alice Pirlot (Research fellow at the Centre for Business Taxation, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford)

Alice Pirlot is a Research Fellow in Law at the Centre for Business Taxation. Prior to joining the Centre, Alice was a research fellow of the National Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) at the University of Louvain, where she completed her PhD in April 2016. Alice’s main expertise lies at the intersection between tax, environmental, EU and international trade law. Her publications cover a wide range of topics, including environmental border tax adjustments, the taxation of the energy sector, the interactions between tax policy and the UN Sustainable Development Goals as well as the WTO law compatibility of the destination-based cash flow tax. Alice has been awarded various prizes and scholarships, including the InBev-Baillet Latour scholarship, FNRS doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships and grants from the Belgian International Youth Office. In 2017, she received an Honourable Mention of the International Fiscal Association for her work on “Environmental Border Tax Adjustments and International Trade Law”.

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Discussant: Marta Villar (Professor in Tax Law at Universidad San Pablo CEU)

Marta Villar is full professor of financial and tax law at the Universidad San Pablo-CEU, CEU Universities and lawyer. PhD degree from the University Complutense of Madrid and master’s degree on European Law from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. She has published, edited, and lectured extensively on a broad range of topics related to Environmental and Energy taxation, including the State aid provisions and their application on tax measures. She is currently principal researcher of the project EU-China: Comparative experiences and contributions to global governance in the fields of climate change, trade, and competition. She has recently coordinated the Jean Monet research project Energy taxation and State aid control: looking for a better coordination and efficiency link and has also participated in several national research projects. Between 2007 and 2011 she was General Secretary of the USP-CEU (Provost). Professor Villar serves as a Visiting Professor for LL.M. courses on European and tax law at several Spanish and foreign universities. She has been Visiting Professor and Visiting Research Fellow, among others, at Georgetown Law Centre, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Université Catholique de Louvain-La Neuve and IBFD (Amsterdam). She is active member of international and national scientific and professional associations on European and tax law (i.e. EC Member of the IFA, IFA-WIN Spanish representative, Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Law and Jurisprudence, co-founder of the Spanish Association of Energy Law (AEDEN), Member of EATLP). Her professional experiences ranged from attorney advisor in the Spanish firm J&A Garrigues. She is legal advisor of EU and tax law matters with an extensively experience of more than 25 years. Among other activities, she has been external consultant of the European Commission (TAXUD); she has participated in several OECD meetings, in the COP25, and has provided advice on different litigation and environmental tax issues (e.g. the tax lease regime, the Spanish goodwill tax deduction;  several environmental tax problems; energy transition in the electric sector).

14 April 18.00-19.30 CET

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This talk examines the tax enforcement implications of colorblind tax data--the omission of race and ethnicity from the collection and published analysis of tax data. It begins by tracing the omission of race and ethnicity from IRS statistical publications since 1913, Joint Committee on Taxation publications since 1926, and Treasury Office of Tax Analysis publications since 1974. It shows how these omissions are exceptional relative to other areas of public policy where federal data on race and ethnicity are readily available, such as student achievement or healthcare exchange enrolments. It then evaluates the merits of colorblind tax data and argues that tax data should include race and ethnicity in order to meet goals of transparency, democracy, and equality. Colorblind tax data obscure racial inequality and prevent its remedy. Colorblind tax data also undermine the democratic accountability of tax policy. This talk will then discuss how race and ethnicity, even when not asked about on tax forms, might influence tax enforcement outcomes, including audit selection, examination results, and settlement amounts. The potential for racially biased tax enforcement further erodes the case for colorblind tax data.

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Moderator: Yvette Lind (Assistant professor, Copenhagen Business School)

Paper presenter: Jeremy Bearer-Friend (Associate Professor in Tax Law at the George Washington University Law School)

Jeremy Bearer-Friend is an Associate Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. His research views taxpaying as a civic act that shapes a citizen's relationship to government. His scholarship examines the omission of race and ethnicity from tax data collection and tax data analysis, the use of administrative discretion to shape the civic features of taxpaying, and the potential of elective in-kind contributions to government in lieu of, or in tandem with, cash payments. Prior to academia, Professor Bearer-Friend was Tax Counsel to Senator Elizabeth Warren, leading the Senator’s work on a wide range of tax matters, including tax filing simplification, international tax reform, and the tax treatment of student loan discharges.  

Discussant: Steven Dean (Professor in Tax Law at New York University and Brooklyn Law School)

Steven Dean is Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. Professor Dean’s scholarship explores the tension between neoliberal and progressive thought in tax law. His work also examines the changing relationship between profit- and mission-driven ventures and between philanthropy and investing. His publications have appeared in the NYU Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, the Boston College Law Review, the Tulane Law Review and the UC Davis Law Review. His collaborations include the books Federal Taxation of Corporations and Corporate Transactions (Aspen 2018, with Brad Borden) and Social Enterprise Law: Trust, Public Benefit and Capital Markets (Oxford 2017, with Dana Brakman Reiser). He graduated from Yale Law School, practiced at Debevoise & Plimpton and at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He has served as Vice Dean at Brooklyn Law School and the Faculty Director of NYU Law’s renowned Graduate Tax Program. He also created and hosts the podcast The Tax Maven.

Seminar 7 - A Hitchhiker´s guide to comparative tax scholarship

28 April 18.00-19.30 CET

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Comparative law offers scholars a fascinating lens through which to discover new insights about the world, but only if we take on comparative law projects. Few legal scholars devote a substantial strand of their research to comparative study, and so their work fails to benefit from the active and prolonged debates in comparative law. This session seeks to render more accessibility to the comparative law scholarship with the aim of facilitating easier access to comparative law insights for tax (and hopefully other) law scholars.

Paper presenter: Kim Brooks (Professor in Tax Law at Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University)

Kim Brooks is a Professor of Law and the Purdy Crawford Chair in Business Law at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University. Teaches tax and serves as the Dean of the Faculty of Management.

Discussant: Yvette Lind (Assistant Professor in Tax Law at Copenhagen Business School)

Yvette Lind is an Assistant professor in tax law at Copenhagen Business School as of 2019. She defended her doctoral thesis (“Crossing a Border” published by Jure) on taxation and social security contributions linked to cross-border working at Umeå University (Sweden) in 2017 and subsequently received a post-doc from the Swedish TOR/Skattenytt foundation (2017-2019). The post-doc project focused on the relationship between taxation and state aid law in an international setting, e.g. state aid investigations linked to multinational corporations and the design and application of environmental taxes. Currently exploring research questions concerning taxation and democracy.

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Twitter: @YsLind

12 May 18.00-19.30 CET

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At this seminar I want to use Michel Foucault’s concept of “episteme” to analyze the way in which the Swedish tax law discipline unconsciously departs from a male homo economicus and effectively precludes any critique of this premise. Swedish tax law makes no distinction between men and women. Yet, the socioeconomic effects of Swedish tax law reveal how seemingly neutral provisions disfavor women. To use a standard that seems neutral, although it effectively disadvantages a particular group of people, is commonly known as indirect discrimination. A question, therefore, is how Swedish tax law complies with constitutional and supranational demands for anti-discrimination. What is even more interesting is why this question has not been discussed within the Swedish tax law discipline. It seems to be a non-question. I think Foucault's concept of episteme can provide useful insights into why this is the case. 

Moderator: Yvette Lind (Assistant professor, Copenhagen Business School)

Paper presenter: Patrik Emblad (Post-doc at the School of Business, Economics and Law at Gothenburg University)

Patrik Emblad is a Doctor of Laws (Jur.dr.) with a specialization in tax law at the School of Law, Business and Economics, University of Gothenburg. He primarily applies discourse theory within his research, with the aim to analyze various aspects of tax law. His doctoral thesis focuses upon the way in which private law is being constructed within a Swedish tax law context. Most recently, he has investigated how the concept of sovereignty to tax may serve to maintain inter-nation power relations.

Twitter: @Pemblad

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Discussant: Eva-Maria Svensson (Professor in Law at the School of Business, Economics and Law at Gothenburg University)

Eva-Maria Svensson’s research interests include legal philosophy and theory, particularly in the field feminist/gender legal studies, freedom of speech, ageing and capability, gender equality in the Arctic and Studies of Academic Knowledge in Law. 

Seminar 9 - Roundtable: “Comparative perspectives on tax challenges faced by the global south”

26 May 18.00-19.30 CET

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Maintaining a well-functioning tax system is not an easy task. If this is true for sophisticated tax administrations from the North, governments' problems in the global South are much more challenging. Countries in the South are still developing their economies and political institutions while simultaneously dealing with disruptive global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Three phrases have occupied the international tax agenda for the past decade: base erosion, profit shifting, and the digitalization of the economy. Although relevant for all countries, these topics ultimately reflect a decision to prioritize relatively wealthy nations' revenue concerns while ignoring systemic flaws at both the national and international levels that explain why other states struggle to tax. Factors that lead to weak taxation in the Global South include inadequate human and economic resources, the existence of diverging tax mixes and different policy objectives, as well as negative spillovers such as incentives for tax competition, the distribution of taxing rights and allocation of the global tax base, meaningful participation in transnational negotiations and decision-making, and structural power imbalances and inequality gaps. Bringing together perspectives from scholars of different backgrounds, this seminar will explore those and other tax challenges encountered by less-developed countries in implementing tax norms and standards in a digitalized global economy under crisis and possible solutions for building more sustainable tax systems.

Convener: Yvette Lind (Assistant professor, Copenhagen Business School)

Moderator: Daisy Ogembo (Post-doc at Faculty of Law, Oxford University)

Daisy Ogembo is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Oxford University Faculty of Law and a Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. She researches tax law, an inherently inter-disciplinary speciality that draws heavily from scholarly perspectives in economics, politics, and psychology. Her research interests are in tax law and policy, constitutionalism and taxation, administrative law and taxation, comparative taxation, tax and development, and taxation of the shadow economy and small businesses. A significant part of her research explores the difficulties that tax authorities in lower-income countries in Africa contend with, in discharging their core mandate, and the broader legal, socio-economic, and political contexts upon which their success is contingent.

Tarcisio Magalhaes (Professor in Law at University of Antwerp) 

Dr. Tarcísio Diniz Magalhães is a Professor of Law at the University of Antwerp and a researcher in digitalization and taxation at the Antwerp Tax Academy and DigiTax Centre of Excellence, as well as a Course Lecturer at the McGill University Faculty of Law. A former postdoctoral researcher at McGill Law and IBFD, he holds Doctor, Master and Bachelor of Law degrees, all obtained with honors at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), under merit-based scholarships. His PhD thesis “Critical Theory of International Tax Law” (published in 2019) was awarded the Best Thesis in Law prize, receiving Honorable Mention by the Brazilian government for its originality and relevance to scientific, technological, cultural, social and innovation development. He has also been a visiting scholar under merit-based scholarships at WU Vienna (Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law), the Max Planck Society (Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2020, he was nominated as one of the 35 Leaders of the Future in Taxation (TaxCOOP).

Twitter: @TarDMagalha 

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Wura Eyitayo (Doctoral candidate at Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University)

I grew up in Nigeria inspired by my father’s career as a lawyer. Years later, I decided to follow in his footsteps. After earning my law degree from the University of Lagos in 2013, I practiced at two law firms in that city. I moved to Canada in 2016 to earn my master’s degree in Law. I am now in my fourth year as a PhD candidate at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. The aim of my research is to examine the nature of the tax treaty network of three African countries, namely Nigeria, Botswana, and Tanzania. Second, I examine the impact that these treaties have on tax revenue generation in the three countries. These questions will lead to my argument that the way these tax treaties are structured, they continue to impede tax revenue generation in the three African countries, which is a bane to the fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A comparative analysis of the tax treaty networks which I will undertake will show if these countries have similar tax treaty provisions, the implications of these provisions on tax revenue generation, and possible recommendations on how the three countries can reform their tax treaties to increase tax revenue generation. The three countries are chosen to demonstrate similar challenges that impede tax revenue generation across the African continent, and how African countries can collectively change the story by reforming their tax treaties to reflect the changes proposed in my thesis. My goal is to help design effective and efficient international tax rules and policies for fostering inclusive growth and development in the three African countries and in other African countries as well. 

Twitter: @Oladiwura01

Diane Ring (Professor in Law at Boston College Law School)

Diane M. Ring currently serves as the Associate Dean of Faculty, Professor of Law and the Dr. Thomas F. Carney Distinguished Scholar at Boston College Law. She researches and writes primarily in the fields of international taxation, corporate taxation, labor and taxation, and ethical issues in tax practice. Her recent work addresses issues including information exchange, tax leaks, international tax relations, regulation in the pandemic, sharing economy and human equity transactions, and ethics in international tax. Diane was a consultant for the United Nation’s 2014 project on tax base protection for developing countries, and the U.N.'s 2013 project on treaty administration for developing countries. She is also co-author in three case books in taxation —one on corporate taxation, one on international taxation, and one on ethical problems in federal tax practice. Diane has also contributed chapters to books on the gig economy, sharing economy, the tax base of developing countries, and comparative income taxation.

Prior to joining Boston College Law School, Diane was an associate professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, and an assistant professor at Harvard Law School. Before entering academia, she practiced at the firm of Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, D.C., and also clerked for Judge Jon O. Newman of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. She received her A.B and J.D from Harvard University.

Twitter: @ringdi_dr