New Normal: Can Global Financial Transparency Deter Corporate Tax Avoidance? with Preetika Joshi

While tax policies are complicated and often seem unfair, new global solutions can both simplify how corporations pay their taxes and make payment more equitable for countries owed their share of tax revenue. In episode 10 of the second season of The New Normal podcast series, Desautels Professor Preetika Joshi joins journalist Dave Kaufman to discuss tax avoidance and income shifting by corporations, including whether country-by-country reporting is an effective tax avoidance deterrent and how new technologies like blockchain and AI will make tax avoidance more difficult in the future. 

“Country-by-country reporting requires large multinational corporations to file a form, disclosing global allocation of activities and profits in all jurisdictions a corporation calls home,” explains Joshi. For example, Apple would file this form in the United States, RBC would file in Canada, but the U.S. and Canada would take that form and would share it with the tax administrations of every country where these companies have operations. For companies like Apple, that's almost every country.”

“It’s a pretty significant problem,” she continues. “The estimate can run into hundreds of billions of dollars globally, and this has been growing over the years.” In 2018, the international monetary fund estimated this to be around 500 to 600 billion, more than many countries’ GDPs put together. 

Read more on Delve and read the transcript.

Delve’s The "New Normal" podcast series is a collaboration between journalist Dave Kaufman and Delve, the official thought leadership platform of McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management. The “New Normal” is produced by Delve and Dave Kaufman, with audio engineering by David Rawalia. Each episode looks in-depth at a different aspect of the new normal that we are all navigating due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Original music by Saku Mantere.

Dave Kaufman is a Montreal-based journalist and commentator. He has worked for CJAD 800 and TSN 690 Radio in Montreal, CTV News Channel, CTV Montreal, and TalkRadio and SkyNews in the United Kingdom. He has written for the National Post, Montreal Gazette, and Toronto Sun and other publications. Follow him on Twitter at @TheKaufmanShow.

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