S&O Monthly Seminar on Tax Evasion

The S&O Institute is pleased to announce its next monthly seminar on Tuesday March 8th from 12.00 pm to 2.00 pm, on HEC campus. 

One academic and one practitioner guest to exchange on the topic of tax evasion

For this session, devoted to Tax Evasion, we will welcome two remarkable guest speakers. Our academic guest for the session is Niels Johannesen, Professor of Economics at University of Copenhagen. Niels’ primary research interests include International Taxation, Tax Evasion, Tax Avoidance, Tax Planning, Taxation of Multinational Firms, Taxation and Regulation of the Financial Sector. Niels is one of the coauthors of the controversial World Bank paper (Elite Capture of Foreign Aid: Evidence from Off Shore Bank Accounts) that linked its aid payouts to money funnelled to financial havens. Niels' talk will be about offshore tax evasion.

Abstract:  Wealthy households hold trillions of dollars of assets on undeclared accounts in tax havens. In response, a recent global policy has cracked down on banking secrecy by requiring all banks to report account-level information to the home governments of their foreign customers. This talk reviews the existing evidence on offshore tax evasion and provides preliminary results from ongoing research on the new policy.

Our practitioner guest for the session is Bradley C. Birkenfeld, one of the most significant financial whistleblowers in history and the author of Lucifer’s Banker.  As an international private banker, he exposed how UBS, the world’s largest bank, helped ultra-wealthy Americans commit billions in tax fraud. His bombshell revelations cracked the impenetrable fortress of Swiss banks, proving that offshore financial institutions systematically aided clients’ tax evasion, His case triggered monumental changes in banking laws, the federal tax code and international tax treaties.

Program for the academic year 2021-2022 can be consulted here.

For more information, please contact Iiris Sacchet: sacchet@hecfr