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CORPORATE & FINANCIAL LAW: INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES eJOURNAL"A Better Model for Australia’s Enhanced FinTech Sandbox"
ANTON N. DIDENKO, University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Faculty of Law On 1 September 2020, Australia’s ‘enhanced regulatory sandbox’ (ERS) finally became operational. The ERS replaced the previous FinTech sandbox established and operated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), which had existed since 2016 but attracted only seven participants. This research analyses how and why Australia’s sandbox framework – with its unique non-authorisation model of operation – has evolved until now and evaluates whether the new enhanced sandbox regime can help to achieve its stated objectives. This article shows that the current sandbox reform merely scrapes the surface of the many challenges underlying ASIC’s FinTech sandbox and argues that these challenges can only be adequately resolved by revising the chosen sandbox model and switching to an authorisation-based sandbox design. "A Fair Income Tax on the Trillion-dollar Behemoths"
CALVIN H. JOHNSON, University of Texas at Austin - School of Law Our trillion-dollar market capitalization behemoths, Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, pay effective tax rates of between 0.65 percent and 2.9 percent because they deduct immediately ("expense") their intangible investments that have value beyond the end of the year. Current regulations allow expensing of investments that cannot be sold or seized apart from the business as a whole, but they also permit mandatory capitalization of expenditures with value beyond the tax year upon publication in the Federal Register. Treating the investments as creating basis, not expensing, and correcting prior year's error of allowing expensing of costs with continuing value would raise $6 trillion revenue, under income tax norms, without the participation of Congress.
DAIN C. DONELSON, University of Iowa This study examines the effect of shareholder scrutiny of tax issues on corporate tax behavior. Specifically, we examine the factors associated with receiving shareholder tax litigation and the effect of such litigation on the future tax behavior of both the sued firm and its peers. We find shareholder tax litigation is more likely when firms exhibit higher levels of tax avoidance and greater tax uncertainty. Further, sued firms decrease tax avoidance activities (increasing their cash and GAAP ETRs and reducing the likelihood of extreme tax avoidance) after the suit. Finally, we find a spillover effect from shareholder scrutiny over tax issues. That is, treatment firms from the same industry as sued firms increase their cash and GAAP ETRs and decrease their UTBs and instances of extreme tax avoidance relative to control firms after the sued firm’s shareholder tax litigation, and results are strongest where theory predicts results to be concentrated. "Carbonwashing: A New Type of Carbon Data-Related ESG Greenwashing"
SOH YOUNG IN, Global Projects Center, Stanford University, Precourt Institute for Energy, Stanford University Despite the increased attention and capital incentives around corporate sustainability, the development of sustainability reporting standards and monitoring systems has been progressing at a slow pace. As a result, companies have misaligned incentives to deliberately or selectively communicate information not matched with actual environmental impacts or make largely unsubstantiated promises around future ambitions. These incidents are broadly called “greenwashing,” but there is no clear consensus on its definition and taxonomy. We pay particular attention to the threat of greenwashing concerning carbon emission reductions by coining a new term, “carbonwashing.” Since carbon mitigation is the universal goal, the corporate carbon performance data supply chain is relatively more advanced than that of the entire sustainability data landscape. Nonetheless, the threat of carbonwashing persists, even far more severe than general greenwashing due to the financial values attached to corporate carbon performance. This paper contextualizes sustainable finance-related carbonwashing via an outline of the communication as well as the measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) of carbon emission mitigation performance. Moreover, it proposes several actionable policy recommendations on how industry stakeholders and government regulators can reduce carbonwashing risks. | ||||||||
