经济学人财经||多国寻外援破避税难题
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Mayof, 女，大三, catti三级备考中, 比较文学考研备考中
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Reclaiming the booty
回收“战利品”
英文部分选自经济学人Finance and economics版块
Reclaiming the booty
回收“战利品”
Countries are seeking help to deal with corporate tax avoidance
多国寻外援破避税难题
Avoidance hits poorer countries particularly hard
企业避税对穷国打击尤重
PORT ROYAL, at the mouth of Kingston harbour, was once the largest city in the Caribbean, its population swollen by privateers paid by the English and the Dutch to attack Spanish ships. When the practice of issuing such “letters of marque” faded in the 17th century, crews went rogue. As pirates, they continued to use the Jamaican port as their base and to spend their loot there, earning it a reputation for unparalleled debauchery.
位于金斯敦港(Kingston harbour)入海口的皇家港(PORT ROYAL)曾是加勒比海地区最大的城市，历史上曾因其大量的私掠船受雇于英国和荷兰从事袭击西班牙船只的勾当，人口得以大增。17世纪，私掠特许证(从某一个国家获得的合法抢劫的证书）)的新发逐步被取消，这些私掠船的船员开始胡作非为。身为海盗，他们继续将大本营扎在这个牙买加的港口，在此消费他们的战利品，这个地方也因此被冠上“堕落之城”的恶名。
Jamaica still has a piracy problem, but today’s buccaneers are in surrounding territories. Unenamoured by Jamaica’s 25% corporate income-tax rate, some international firms with operations there find ways to shelter profits using the British Virgin Islands and other nearby tax havens.
牙买加至今还存在海盗问题，只不过这帮海盗现如今都周边地区活动。由于不满牙买加25%的企业所得税税率，一些在当地有业务开展的跨国公司设法将利润转移至英属维尔京群岛(British Virgin Islands)和附近其他避税天堂。
The scale of this plunder is unclear—Jamaica publishes no estimate of its corporate-tax gap. But the problem is serious enough to lead the government to seek outside help. Since 2017, auditors from Tax Administration Jamaica (TAJ), the national tax authority, have received training to help them identify and challenge the tax planning of large firms. The assistance is offered by Tax Inspectors Without Borders (TIWB), a programme backed by the OECD and the UN.
因为牙买加不对外公布本国企业所得税缺口，所以这种经济上的“掠夺”规模尚不清楚。但这个问题已经很严重，牙买加政府不得不开始寻求外界帮助。自2017年以来，买加国家税务管理局(TAJ)的审计人员开始接受有关大公司的税收筹划稽查和问询方面的培训这些培训由税务稽查员无国界组织(TIWB)提供，这是一个由经合组织和联合国共同发起设立的项目。
Jamaica is not alone in suffering leakage. Estimates of uncollected revenues vary. The OECD reckons that exchequers worldwide lose $100bn-240bn a year to corporate tax avoidance. An IMF study in 2016 suggested that the total could be over $600bn—equivalent to a quarter of all corporate tax collected globally. Avoidance has grown in line with intangible assets, such as intellectual property, which are easier to shift to tax havens than physical assets. An analysis of American multinationals and their international subsidiaries in 2017 found that the share of profits declared elsewhere for tax purposes had risen from 5-10% in the 1990s to 25%. Poor countries are hit hardest because they rely more on corporate tax revenues than rich countries, and because international tax rules, originally crafted to suit advanced economies, are stacked against them.
并非只有牙买加深受偷税漏税问题困扰。各国损失的逃税金额各不相同。经合组织估计，就企业避税来说，各国财政每年损失的总金额在1000亿至2400亿美元之间。国际货币基金组织在2016年发布的一项研究显示，该数据可能超过6000亿美元，占到全球征得的企业所得税总和的四分之一。随着无形资产权重（如知识产权）增加，避税金额也水涨船高。因为相比有形资产，无形资产更容易被转移到避税天堂。2017年的一项针对美国跨国公司及其海外子公司的分析显示：出于避税目的而在其他地区申报的利润占比从上世纪90年代的5-10%上升到了25%。贫穷国家受到的打击最为严重。一方面是由于它们比富裕国家更依赖企业税收；另一方面，国际税收规则设计之初就是以发达经济体为导向的量身定制的，贫穷国家本来就处于不利地位。
In Jamaica international investors are particularly active in tourism, mining and food and drink. As the economy has recovered from a debt crisis, so have profits. Transactions that move income offshore—for instance via a travel group’s online-booking portal, charging a local affiliate for its services—can be perfectly legal. But international rules, overseen by the OECD, state that such “transfer pricing” should be at an arm’s-length, market rate. There is room for subjectivity—and gaming.
在牙买加，国际投资者尤其热衷于旅游业、采矿业、食品和饮料业。随着该国经济从债务危机中逐渐复苏，这些产业的投资回报也同样开始增加。通过离岸交易转移所得是完全合法的，例如通过旅游集团的在线预订门户，向当地分支机构收取服务费。但是，按经合组织的国际规定，这种“转让定价”应该以公平的市场利率进行。就这点而言，存在主观性和人为操作的空间。
In the past the TAJ was outgunned, its auditors struggling to master the complexities of cross-border transfer pricing. Change came in 2015. A new law required large taxpayers to provide more information on transactions, placed more onus on companies to show pricing was justified, and introduced bigger fines and even prison terms for transfer-pricing breaches. In 2017 TIWB parachuted in Steffen Scholze, a veteran auditor from Germany’s federal tax office, for a two-week mission, to teach his 70 counterparts at the taj the tricks of the trade. He has since returned six times.
跨境转让定价机制十分复杂，在过去对于牙买加国家税务管理局的审计人员来说是块短板，他们时常感到力不从心。直到2015年，事情才迎来了转机。当时出台的一部新法要求纳税大户提供更多的交易信息，有责任给出有关定价的合理解释，并对转让定价中的违法行为设定更高的罚款，严重的甚至可能面临监禁。2017年，德国联邦税务局资深审计员Steffen Scholze赶赴牙买加执行一项为期两周的任务—向牙买加国家税务管理局的70名同行传授业务技巧。此后，他又相继去过6次。
Irate of the Caribbean
加勒比海的愤怒
Companies claim that the new law and TWIB’s intervention have raised compliance costs. At a recent event in Kingston, a local tax partner from EY, an advisory firm, went further, hinting at an image problem for TWIB: the average Jamaican might see it as another case of “white foreigners telling us what to do”. But Mr Scholze says audits“provide certainty, which companies need”. The extra data requirements don’t involve much extra work: “they already have more than 90% of what we’re after.”
各大公司声称新法规和TWIB的介入提高了合规成本。最近在金斯敦举行的一次活动中，安永咨询公司的某当地税务合作伙伴暗示TWIB面临形象问题：普通牙买加人可能会把TWIB的介入当成“外国白人对我们指手画脚”的又一个范例。但肖尔茨（Scholze）指出，税收审计其实也“给公司提供了经营所需的确定性”。要求企业提供更详尽的数据并不会增加太多的工作量，“我们所需的90%以上数据信息，他们都已经提供过了”。
The TAJ appears happy with the help it has received. As one auditor explains, TWIB has helped it “cut through the fluff” when companies provide documents, and to get better at negotiating with firms and their well-paid advisers when disagreements arise over the pricing of transactions.
牙买加国家税务管理局对外援倒是拍手叫好。一位政府审计师称，各大公司提交相关文件后，TWIB会帮助税务局“筛除无价值的信息”。在交易定价方面出现分歧时，TWIB还能帮忙税务部门更好地与这些公司及它们的高薪顾问协商。
“Recently a team came back from meeting one company so excited,” relates another TAJ auditor. For the first time ever when dealing with a large taxpayer, “our people did the talking and the other side sat dumb”, struggling to answer the questions. The hope, she says, is that when one firm receives a bill, others in the same industry take note and perhaps even ask for an audit to clarify their tax position—as happened in Liberia when the tax authority began targeting mining companies with TWIB help.
牙买加国家税务管理局的另一位审计师提到，“最近局里的某团队在和一家公司谈判归来时满面春风。这是他们第一次与纳税大户打交道。整个谈判过程几乎都是我们在主导审计员们的问题直捣要害以至于企业代表几乎无话可说。她表示，他们所希望的是当一家公司收到税务账单时，同行业的其他公司也会加以注意，甚至主动邀请一位审计员给他们厘清课税状况，就像利比里亚税务局那样，在TWIB帮助下对所有采矿业公司开展税务稽查。
Such audits move slowly, typically taking two years including appeals. The first of those done by the TAJ under TIWB’s wing is nearing an end. (The resulting bill can be paid electronically, but the company still has to collect a paper receipt from a kiosk at the TAJ.) The sums involved are not huge: one of the bigger cases is set to bring in “potentially” J$350m ($2.6m), says an official. But TIWB is lean. For every dollar spent, over $100 of extra revenue is collected, says James Karanja, who heads its secretariat.
类似的审计进度缓慢，算上诉环节在内大约要耗时两年。在TIWB支持下的第一个实操项目正接近尾声（经审计的税务账单支持电子支付，但对象公司依然需要在税务局自主服务终端生成纸质票据）。审计出来的额外税款总额并不大，其中一个较大的案子也只有3.5亿牙买加元（约260万美元）。但TIWB秘书长詹姆斯·卡兰贾表示，“TIWB效率很高，在审计上每花费一美元，就可以带来超过100美元的额外税收。”
Having answered 52 calls for help in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and eastern Europe since 2015, the programme is set to reach 100 by 2020. A recent addition is Papua New Guinea, which wants help unravelling logging groups’ tax affairs. It is also helping Indonesia decipher the reams of data received under global tax-information-exchange initiatives.
自2015年至今，TIWB已响应了来自非洲、亚洲、拉丁美洲、加勒比和东欧地区的52起援助请求，该组织希望到2020年能够达到100起。最近的一起求助来自巴布亚新几内亚，该国希望厘清伐木集团的税务问题。TIWB还正在帮助印度尼西亚破译“全球税务信息交换协议”框架下的各项目收到的大量数据。
TIWB will need to evolve as it grows, not least because international corporate-tax rules are in flux. These are no longer up to the job. Multinationals can too easily exploit mismatches between national laws to divert taxable profits or even make them vanish. But rewriting the rules is proving tricky. A first stab, led by the OECD in 2015, dealt with some of the most aggressive types of avoidance but failed to secure global agreement on taxing the digital economy. It also ducked a big structural question: why continue to base the rules on the arm’s-length principle, when multinationals exist precisely so that market prices need not apply in intragroup transactions?
在发展的过程中，YIWB仍需要不断革新。很大程度上是因为国际企业税规则正处于动荡之中，这些规则已经跟不上时代的脚步。跨国公司可以很轻易地利用不同国家法律的差异来转移应纳税的利润，甚至让这些利润“消失”。然而重新制定这些法规不是件容易事。2015年，经济合作与发展组织牵头进行了首次尝试，旨在解决一些最具过激的避税问题，但在对数字化经济征税议题上未能达成全球共识。此外，这次协商还回避了一个重大的结构性问题：，既然跨国公司的存在正是为了用内部定价取代市场定价，那我们为什么还要继续将规则建立在公平交易原则之上呢？
The digital impasse has forced a rethink. After consulting the 127 countries in its “Inclusive Framework”, the OECD last month floated the idea of “reconsidering” transfer-pricing rules and “go[ing] beyond” the arm’s-length concept. This marks a shift, says Alex Cobham of Tax Justice Network, an NGO. America long defended the transfer-pricing status quo. But since its big domestic tax reform under President Donald Trump, it has shifted its position on the international rules. The final destination is unclear, but the direction is towards better alignment of where tax is levied with where economic activity takes place. That could mean greater taxing rights for “source” and “market” countries (ie, where firms produce things and the home of their customers and digital users); fewer taxing rights for countries where parent firms are domiciled, often rich ones; and less scope for profits to be booked in tax havens with flimsy justification, says Pascal Saint-Amans, the OECD’s tax chief.
打破围绕数字经济的僵局需要另辟蹊径。基于“包容性框架”，在广泛咨询了127个国家之后，OECD于上月提出“重新审议”转移定价以及“超越”公平定价原则的理念。来自非政府组织税收正义联盟（Tax Justice Network）的Alex Cobham表示，这是一次转变。美国长期以来一直试图维持转移定价的现状。但是自从美国总统Donald Trump发起国内大规模税改之后，美国政府在对国际税务规则的态度上也有所改变。尽管国际企业税制改革的终点不得而知，但是其方向是朝着基于经济活动发生地税率进行征税努力。“这也许意味着，“源头”（商品原产地）和“市场”（商品消费者和数字商品使用者所在地）所在国将会获得更多的税收权益而那些跨国企业母公司所在国（通常是富裕国家）的则会被剥夺一部分税收利益。同时也能挤压通过避税天堂转移利润的操纵空间，这种避税手段虽然于法合法但于理不通。”OECD的税务总管Pascal Saint-Amans 如是说道。
He is hoping for a global solution by the end of 2020. Mr Cobham believes “we’re closer now than ever before to the kind of open, global discussion of tax rules that could finally redress some of the glaring inequalities in the distribution of taxing rights that lower-income countries face.” But better-off OECD countries are unlikely to cede their outsize rule-setting power and taxing rights without a fight. The situation is “unstable”, admits Mr Saint-Amans.
Cobham希望在2020年底可以达成一个全球的解决方案。他相信现在正是展开一场开放性的围绕税收规则的全球大讨论的前所未有的契机，最终让贫穷国家遭遇的因税收收益分配导致的严重不公平现状得到部分改观。但是较为富裕的OECD国家不太可能会将其税务规则的制定权力以及税收权益拱手相让。局势依旧‘不明朗’”，Saint Amans 先生坦言。
Radical reform is far enough away as to be of no immediate concern to the team tutored by Mr Scholze. The TAJ auditors are bracing for more transfer-pricing tussles. There is talk of bringing in another international expert to beef up expertise in banking and telecoms, two industries with which the German number-cruncher is less familiar. But, as auditors’ confidence grows, so do worries about talent being lured away. Multinationals and tax-advisory firms have reportedly been circling the team. Anyone for privateering?
对于Scholze先生指导的团队来说，大刀阔斧的税务改革并非眼前的当务之急。这些TAJ审计师们正在准备应对更多的转移定价的斗争。现在正在讨论要不要引入另一名国际专家给审计员们培训有关银行和电信业的专业知识，这是Scholze这个算数专家不熟悉的两个领域。但是随着审计员们的信心逐步增强，人才流失的担忧也日渐愈起。据说跨国公司和税务咨询公司已经开始挖墙脚了。还有人要上“私掠船”吗？
翻译组：
Sue，女，游手好闲者，爱电影爱文学爱TE
Lucia ，女，翻译学硕士三年制，经济学人粉丝
Martina，女，谷歌广告从业者，爱电影爱生活，爱金融经济
Gloria，女，经济学在读，爱健身爱电影爱古怪新奇的事物
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Ryan，PR汪，搬砖七八年，老腊肉
Alex,男，工科研究生，文学与科学爱好者，经济学人忠实读者
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Alan，男，金融工程硕士，经济学人粉丝
一国的税收是其财政收入的主要来源，用T表示，政府支出是最主要的财政支出，用G表示。当然一国财政收入不止来自税收，一般还来自发行国债，其他方式诸如他国转移支付等相比税收国债规模要小很多。
需要指出的是，平常所说的赤字和盈余是以一年为期限的，即如果这一年度的收入超过了支出就是盈余，反之就是赤字；它并不是一个累积值，而是一个年度值。无论财政还是贸易都是这样。
一般一国的财政应该要达到平衡，即收入和支出应该水平差不多。但是拉长一个国家的经济周期来看，财政支出和收入并不总是相吻合，理论上这无关紧要，因为今年的赤字理论上应该将在将来以盈余的方式填补，今年积攒下来的盈余可以留备以后使用。但是财政问题往往不那么线性，往往会引发其他问题。
一个典型的例子是：一国面临财政赤字的话，投资人往往会害怕该国通过超发货币来时其赤字减轻（历史上各国减轻财政压力经常采用的手段），因而有资本外流冲动，货币当局在预期有资本外流的情形时为了防止它发生，会反而上升利率，而这又导致了汇率上该国升值造成贸易赤字，也就是我们所说的“双赤字”或者“孪生赤字”。
或者另一种情形，在面对连续好几年的财政赤字时，国家不得不增发国债以达到其财政接近平衡的目的，但是人们已经预期了鉴于财政赤字的严重性，国家可能会超发货币对国家还钱的信心打个问号，而这也会反映出来到国债利率上来，人们要求更高的国债收益率来抵补这部分风险，而国债收益率走高意味着国家偿还的利息即债务将来会更多，进而又恶化了赤字；这种情形下只能指望将来经济好转从而得到更多财政收入同时自身节流缩减支出。
最最坏的一种情况是，一国真的超发货币试图减轻其财政赤字压力，但是虽然债务减轻了，恶性通胀是相当难治理的问题，因为人们已经预期到通胀率的上升，改变这种预期很难，一般只有通过政府换届或者一位相当鹰派的央行行长（并且央行必须独立）才能通过花费至少好几年的时间才能治理通胀，而同时也因为国家信用曾被滥用，该国的国债收益率将会显著升高，国家只能通过良好表现才能互鉴让人相信它的国家信用不会再被滥用，而这个信心的建立时间相当漫长，更加现实的国家超发货币然后违约财政赤字一塌糊涂的治理例子，参看拉美各国。
经济学人这篇讲的是跨过企业利用各国不同税法的漏洞合理避税，建立跨国家的监管缴税的路途还相当漫长，而且其实这个问题早已经出现十多年了，各个国家都没有特别努力解决它。就像之前各国的银行业各国都有各自的法律条例一样，是最后09年全球金融危机终于让各国纷纷加入了巴塞尔协议。跨国公司合理避税本身不会引发任何危机，真的有发生危机的隐患的话，应该是享受到各跨国公司避税的好处的富人们（股东+高管）越来越富，激化了贫富差距，那个时候国家发现凭借自己的税制已经无法对富人进行其财富再分配了，只得求诸全球的通力合作。
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