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1、Electronic copy available at: http:/ Avi-Yonah Taxation, Corporate Social Responsibility, and the Business Enterprise EDITORS: Peer Zumbansen (Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto, Director, Comparative Research in Law and Political Economy, York University), John W. Cioffi (University of California at
2、Riverside), Nassim Nasser (Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto, Production Editor) CLPE RESEARCH PAPER 19/2009 VOL. 05 NO. 03 (2009) Electronic copy available at: http:/ RESEARCH PAPER XX/2007 VOL. XX NO. XX (2007) Electronic copy available at: http:/ CLPE Research Paper 19/2009 Vol. 05 No. 03 (2009) R
3、euven Avi-Yonah TAXATION, CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE BUSINESS ENTERPRISE Abstract: Under the aggregate or nexus of contracts view of the corporation, which is the dominant view among contemporary corporate scholars, corporate social responsibility (CSR) is an illegitimate attempt by man
4、agers to tax shareholders without their consent, and leads to managers being unaccountable to the shareholders that elected them. If so, management can be argued also to have a responsibility to maximize shareholder profits by minimizing corporate taxes as much as possible, and the state has no busi
5、ness in encouraging corporations to engage in illegitimate CSR through the tax system. This paper argues that both of these views, when taken to their extreme, are misguided. First, if corporations are not permitted to engage in CSR, then all social responsibility functions devolve on the state. Bot
6、h taxing and spending become, to use Milton Friedmans language, purely governmental functions. But if corporate managers are required to minimize tax payments as much as possible, that could mean that the state is left without adequate resources to fulfill its governmental function. Thus, the aggreg
7、ate view of the corporation, taken to its logical extreme, is self-defeating, because it could mean that neither corporations nor the government can fulfill their responsibilities to society. That is not an acceptable outcome. Second, even if from the perspective of management CSR is an illegitimate
8、 tax on shareholders, the government could still legitimately try to encourage corporations to engage in CSR by giving tax incentives. Assuming that some CSR activities are better performed by the private sector than by the government, it seems acceptable for the government to refrain from collectin
9、g certain amounts of tax in order to incentivize the private sector to engage in those activities. This is just as legitimate as the government taxing and then using is procurement muscle (paid for by the taxes) to encourage corporations to engage in CSR, as many governments have recently done. Keyw
10、ords: Corporate social responsibility, corporate tax, tax shelters JEL classification: H25 Reuven S. Avi-Yonah University of Michigan, 625 S. State St. Ann Arbor MI 48109 USA aviyonahumich.edu ii TAXATION, CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE BUSINESS ENTERPRISE Reuven Avi-Yonah* The imposition o
11、f taxes and the expenditure of tax proceeds are governmental functionsThe whole justification for permitting the corporate executive to be selected by the stockholders is that the executive is an agent serving the interests of his principal. This justification disappears when the corporate executive
12、 imposes taxes and spends the proceeds for “social” purposes. Milton Friedman1 I. INTRODUCTION Should corporations pay tax? The usual understanding of this question relates to the debate on whether there should be a corporate tax. Many observers have recently criticized the corporate tax, and some h
13、ave Irwin I. Cohn Professor of Law and Director, International Tax LLM, The University of Michigan. A previous version of this paper appeared as Corporate Social Responsibility and Strategic Tax Behavior, in Wolfgang Schoen (ed.), Tax and Corporate Governance, 183 (2008). I would like to thank David
14、 Hasen, Bob Kuttner, Sagit Leviner, Wolfgang Schoen, Dganit Sivan, Pekka Timmonen, and participants in workshops at Georgetown Law Center, the Interdisciplinary Center- Herzeliya, and the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law. * Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, the Irwin I. Coh
15、n Professor of Law and director of the International Tax LL.M. Program, specializes in international taxation and international law, and is widely published in these subject areas. He also served as consultant to the U.S. Treasury on tax competition and OECD on tax competition, and is a member of th
16、e Steering Group of the OECDs International Network for Tax Research and chair of the American Bar Associations Tax Section Committee on Consumption Taxes. Professor Avi-Yonah earned his B.A., summa cum laude, from Hebrew University and then earned three degrees from Harvard: an A.M. in history, a Ph.D. in history, and a J.D., magna cum laude, f
