Tax Cooperation Without a Duty of Assistance

Abstract

This chapter aims to demonstrate that accounting for the cost of subsistence rights deficits is already possible and indeed is on occasion already undertaken under existing well-accepted tax norms and standards. In doing so, it aims to show that some existing international tax norms could be adjusted to accommodate more source taxation, in the same spirit and along the same lines as those we introduced in Chapter 4 when thinking about ways residence states could facilitate greater taxation at source. It examines how international cooperation with the proposed adjustments could be facilitated using existing tax law precedents and practices as well as conventional international coordination regimes. It raises and answers some of the likely critiques of the proposed approaches, and concludes that, as we saw in Chapter 4, current trends in multilateral policy negotiations may be creating the necessary momentum to achieve a fairer sharing of the cooperative surplus derived from cross-border investment, in line with the entitlement and equal benefit principles.