Tax authorities increasingly deploy algorithmic and AI-assisted systems for audit selection, fraud detection, and automated penalties, yet the legal conditions for their use remain underspecified. This article develops a comparative constitutional framework for algorithmic tax governance, drawing on UK statutory and case law, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, and recent Dutch jurisprudence. It identifies three governance models – the Dutch legality model, the ECtHR proportionality model, and a UK delegative-transparency model – and argues that all three converge on four minimum conditions: explicit legal authority, intelligible transparency, meaningful human oversight, and effective redress. The framework is a portable diagnostic instrument for jurisdictions – including Australia, Canada, Ireland, and EU Member States – relying on broad statutory delegation with fragmented ex post safeguards. Section 103 of the Finance Act (FA) 2020 authorizes automation but does not supply those conditions, leaving safeguards fragmented across tax procedure, data-protection law, and information-law litigation. The article concludes that algorithmic tax administration requires ex ante legislative governance rather than ex post reform.
This article shows (using the United States as an example) that the retaliatory tax measures against discriminatory or extraterritorial taxation by other states are legally restricted by customary international law on countermeasures. The main finding of this article is that the United States’ retaliatory tax measures, as currently envisioned by the US administration, could be seen as illegal under international law, because their activation would serve better as a punishment of foreign states than as an inducement for them to repeal their discriminatory or extraterritorial tax law. This finding reinforces the thesis that the rule of power prevails over the rule of law in the examined sphere of power to tax in the United States. All in all, the article sketches guidance on how any sovereign jurisdiction can defend itself against tax measures implemented and applied by another state through its domestic tax law that is at odds with international law.
Economists support taxes on windfall profits, which are considered equivalent to economic rent and therefore an ideal object for taxation, capable of generating substantial revenue without economic distortions. However, the design of windfall and excess profits taxes is fraught with problems, due to the difficulty of identifying the windfall portion of profit and the inherent risk of imposing additional burdens on specific groups of taxpayers without a valid reason. The purpose of this (two-part) article is to review the economic and legal arguments underlying the taxation of windfalls and, secondly, to distinguish windfalls from excess profits, challenging the belief that they are the same thing; thirdly, to pinpoint the shortcomings of the attempts to separate "supernormal" from "normal" profits. The key finding of the article is that this is hardly feasible. This weakens, on practical grounds, the normative validity and usefulness of the theories supporting the implementation of special taxes on economic rents. What appears to be a supernormal profit often depends on the time frame taken into account, while considering the undertaking's life cycle could tell a different story. Based on these reasons, this article questions the initial statement made by scholars and legislators, i.e. the case for skimming away surplus income through taxation, on both equity and efficiency grounds. Since windfall levies hit only specific groups of taxpayers, their failure in targeting supernormal profits jeopardizes the principle of equality in taxation and, at the same time, weakens the assumption that these kinds of taxes can be applied without economic distortions.
Jurisdictions that seek to safeguard their dividend withholding tax base against traditional treaty-shopping structures involving conduit companies should be equally concerned about dividend-stripping arrangements that eliminate source-state withholding tax through the use of derivatives. Nevertheless, a recent study by the OECD (2023) indicates that awareness of such practices remains limited. This contribution sets out to provide tax policymakers with guidance on how dividend stripping may be addressed, taking into account that jurisdictions differ both in the perceived urgency of the problem and in the administrative capacity they can devote to it. To this end, the article first examines the extent to which existing anti-abuse rules (including provisions of the general anti-abuse rule type) are capable of countering dividend-stripping transactions. It then turns to targeted anti-abuse approaches and presents a proposal: the equity ownership quotient.
The allocation of taxing rights over income derived from offshore extractive activities has proved challenging in tax treaty practice. The issue became evident in the 1960s with the emergence of the mobile offshore petroleum industry, where the OECD Model Tax Convention’s traditional permanent establishment test proved inadequate. In response, the so-called “offshore provision” emerged in bilateral tax treaty practice.This article examines such offshore provisions across historical, current and emerging tax treaty practice, alongside the alternative offshore clause introduced in the OECD’s 2025 update to the Commentary on Article 5 of the OECD Model Tax Convention. A comparative analysis demonstrates that the OECD’s reliance on the state’s bilateral practice has produced a fragmented landscape of offshore clauses. While the OECD’s alternative provision captures core elements of prevailing treaty practice and provides a valuable reference for future treaty negotiations, it does not fully reflect existing treaty practice, particularly recent developments. The article provides interpretative guidance for both existing offshore provisions and the OECD’s alternative provision.
