Article: Power and Expertise in Global Tax Governance

Abstract

It is a rather broadly held misconception that the project on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) began in September 2013 when the G20 Leaders’ endorsed the OECD’s Action Plan on BEPS.1 The general acceptance of this narrative is understandable and perhaps largely trivial. However, it does tell us something important about our tendency to focus on the foreground of issues – on the immediate and obvious. When public focus is narrowed down to notable events, such as the G20 Leaders’ summits, the background work of tax experts fades out of focus. Often, the work of the expert is not even associated with the idea of public power and authority; it is reduced to something concerned with mere technicalities. Yet, it is the expert who outlines the agenda and prepares the discussion drafts and executive summaries that inform the (political) actor in the foreground of the issues that, based on objective expert knowledge, should somehow be addressed in one way or another. The more complex the issue, the less that the actor in the foreground has the technical ability to assess the merits of the experts’ proposition. Sometimes, owing to our desire to be confident in our ability to grasp difficult concepts, we may ultimately support the expert who makes the claim of superior knowledge over an issue we do not fully comprehend precisely as a result of our lack of understanding so as to deny or conceal this deficiency. Occasionally, such false confidence of the foreground actor in their ability to assess the propositions of the expert may result in a feedback loop in which the ideas of the expert appear to legitimize the power of the foreground actor, and this power subsequently appears to legitimize the expert’s ideas. This article will discuss the role of experts and the everyday power they use in the realm of global tax governance. To date, such a discussion has largely escaped the agenda of legal academic discussion.3 Yet, the importance of the discussion on expert power in tax is paramount; unawareness over this constituent element of the current paradigm results in an inability to address what is known as the legitimacy deficit of global tax governance. This will continue to reproduce global power imbalance in favour of the privileged and at the expense of the disenfranchized. The development of international tax norms into a regime of global tax governance will serve as a framework for this discussion thereby rendering the role of experts working under the auspices of the League of Nations and, subsequently, the OECD at the center of the focus. Global tax governance, technocracy, politics of taxation, experts, framing, BEPS, structural bias, legitimacy