Taxing Global Digital Commerce, 2nd Edition

Taxing Global Digital Commerce studies the tax challenges presented by cross-border digital commerce and reports on the rapidly changing environment surrounding the challenges. Digital commerce – the use of computer networks to facilitate transactions involving the production, distribution, sale, and delivery of goods and services – has grown from merely streamlining relations between consumer and business to a much more robust phenomenon embracing efficient business processes within a firm and between firms. Inevitably, the related taxation issues have grown as well. This latest edition of the preeminent text on the taxation of digital transactions revises, updates and expands the book’s coverage that reflects the significant changes that had been made to the content of the earlier volumes. It includes a detailed and up-to-date analysis of income tax and VAT developments regarding digital commerce under the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) reforms. It then explores the new EU VAT rules for both tangible and intangible Internet supplies and the implications of digital commerce for US state retail sales and use tax regimes, taking account of the significant developments resulting from the 2018 US Supreme Court decision in Wayfair.

What’s in this book:
Analysing the practical tax consequences of digital commerce from a multijurisdictional perspective and using examples to illustrate the application of different taxes to digital commerce transactions, the book offers in-depth treatment of such topics as the following:

• how tax rules governing cross-border digital commerce are increasingly applied to all cross-border activities;
• how tax rules and institutional processes have evolved to confront challenges posed by digital commerce;
• how an emerging ‘tax war’ is developing whereby different countries are unilaterally imposing new direct tax rules on cross-border digital commerce;
• how digital commerce increases the complexity of implementing and enforcing the collection of VAT/GST in cross-border situations;
• how technology enhances cross-border tax information exchanges; and
• how technology reduces both compliance and enforcement costs.

The authors offer insightful views on the likely development of new approaches to taxing cross-border digital commerce and expand their focus beyond ‘law’ to undertake a more systematic study of tax law and technology change in the digital age, and they seek to to identify general policy lessons from their study of global and United States subnational rules.

How this will help you:
This edition, while building on the analysis of the relationship between traditional tax laws and the Internet in the previous editions, contains a more explicit and systematic consideration of digital commerce issues and the ongoing policy responses to them. As the world’s premier book on the topic of tax and digital commerce, this book will be welcomed by tax professionals and academics everywhere for the important contribution it makes towards the design of cross-border tax rules that are both conceptually sound and practical in application.