21 Facts About Tax havens

The harm of traditional and corporate tax havens has been particularly noted in developing nations, where the tax revenues are needed to build infrastructure.

Tax havens are mostly successful and well-governed economies, and being a haven has brought prosperity.

Hines merely noted that tax havens were: "a group of countries with unusually low tax rates".

Tax havens are typically small, well-governed states that impose low or zero tax rates on foreign investors.

The FSF–IMF definition focused on the BEPS tools Tax havens offer, and on Hines' observation that the accounting flows from BEPS tools are "out-of-proportion" and thus distort the economic statistics of the haven.

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Hines' largest havens were dominated by corporate tax havens, who Dharmapala noted in 2014 accounted for the bulk of global tax haven activity from BEPS tools.

Zucman pointed out that the CORPNET research under-represented Tax havens associated with US technology firms, like Ireland and the Cayman Islands, as Google, Facebook and Apple do not appear on Orbis.

However, modern European tax havens include corporate-focussed tax havens, which maintain higher levels of OECD transparency, such as the Netherlands and Ireland.

Many tax havens are former or current dependencies of the United Kingdom and still use the same core legal structures.

Post–2010 rise in quantitative techniques of identifying tax havens has resulted in a more stable list of the largest tax havens.

Strongest consensus amongst academics regarding the world's largest tax havens is therefore: Ireland, Singapore, Switzerland and the Netherlands, and the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Luxembourg, Hong Kong and Bermuda, with the United Kingdom still in transformation.

Longest list from Non–governmental, Quantitative research on tax havens is the University of Amsterdam CORPNET July 2017 Conduit and Sink OFCs study, at 29.

Post–2010 research on tax havens is focused on quantitative analysis, and tends to ignore very small tax havens where data is limited as the haven is used for individual tax avoidance rather than corporate tax avoidance.

Tax havens have high GDP-per-capita rankings, as their "headline" economic statistics are artificially inflated by the BEPS flows that add to the haven's GDP, but are not taxable in the haven.

Research into tax havens suggest a high GDP-per-capita score, in the absence of material natural resources, as an important proxy indicator of a tax haven.

Important academic leaders in tax haven research, such as Hines, Dharmapala, and others, cite evidence that, in certain cases, tax havens appear to promote economic growth in higher-tax countries, and can support beneficial hybrid tax regimes of higher taxes on domestic activity, but lower taxes on international sourced capital or income:.

Dyreng and Lindsey, offer evidence that US firms with foreign affiliates in certain tax havens pay lower foreign taxes and higher US taxes than do otherwise-similar large US companies.

Some notable authors on tax havens describe them as "captured states" by their offshore finance industry, where the legal, taxation and other requirements of the professional service firms operating from the tax haven are given higher priority to any conflicting State needs.

The OECD has made the investigation of PTRs a key part of its long-term project of combatting Harmful Tax havens Practices, started in 1998; by 2019, the OECD had investigated over 255 PTRs.

CORPNET's results split the understanding of tax havens into Sink OFCs, which are traditional tax havens to which corporates route untaxed funds, and Conduit OFCs, which are the jurisdictions that create the OECD-compliant tax structures that enable the untaxed funds to be routed from the higher-tax jurisdictions to the Sink OFCs.

In 2010, Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax havens Compliance Act, which requires foreign financial institutions of broad scope – banks, stock brokers, hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies, trusts – to report directly to the US Internal Revenue Service all clients who are US persons.