La cooperazione fiscale internazionale. Contributo allo studio dell’equilibrio fra contrasto all’evasione fiscale internazionale e tutela dei diritti del contribuente

This doctoral research analyses the delicate balance between the State’s interest to assess and recover unpaid taxes and taxpayers’ rights protection, which is increasingly jeopardised in cross-border co-operation procedures. When assessing and collecting taxes, States are often dealing with transnational situations, which have became extremely common in the present globalised economy. In this respect, taxpayers resort to ingenious tax planning schemes aimed at obtaining substantial reductions of the tax burden normally due to the tax office, making a great use of so-called tax havens. States traditionally has been very suspicious towards international tax co-operation, since the “taxing power” (together with the “punitive power”) has always been considered one of the main expressions of national sovereignty, which would be inevitably limited or reduced in case of co-operation in assessing or collecting foreign tax claims. This approach (also known as the revenue rule) is deeply rooted in anglo-saxon common law and was considered justified by the public nature of tax provisions and by their effectiveness only within the national territorial borders, but today its validity is constantly dismissed by certain recent developments and by a new “co-operative” trend in case-law. The research analyses the developments of international tax co-operation in light of the exchange of information and mutual assistance in the recovery of taxes, which represent two faces of the same coin. The “hard-core” of the investigation is the attempt to read the present global scenario of international tax co-operation with the specific aim of identifying tax duties as universal values, worthy of legal enforcement also outside of the territorial borders of the taxing State. At the same time, the research deals with the controversial practice of acquiring tax information abroad e.g. the recent Liechtenstein, UBS and HSBC cases, which is an extreme attempt to tackle tax evasion by acquiring data stolen from foreign-based bank accounts.