Abstract
There has been a global demand for countries to tackle tax avoidance practices by multinational corporations who are taking advantage of the irregularities and loopholes in tax regulations. Tax avoidance is becoming integrated to business strategies and more corporations are justifying their aggressive tax actions because they are ‘within the confines of the letter of the law’. This has long been an issue for tax authorities and governments in both developing and developed countries. Corporations and their tax consultants have constantly been able to get around new legislation and identify “novel” tax avoidance schemes and loopholes to take advantage of despite extensive anti-avoidance initiatives by national governments, NGOs, and other international organisations. The methods available for governments and other international regulators have shown to have limited success in reducing tax avoidance. In light of these issues, this thesis explores tax avoidance in relation to corporate social responsibility.This thesis argues that CSR mechanisms can be an alternative used in combating tax avoidance. This thesis demonstrates that anti-avoidance initiatives have many traits and similar goals with other socially conscious endeavours like CSR, and this can be utilised to regulate the tax behaviour of corporations. This thesis provides a unique contribution by proposing a new standard of CSR and providing a guideline corporations can use to self-regulate themselves to
be more responsible with their tax practices. Similarly, these guidelines on how to determine if a corporate tax activity is responsible or not can be utilised by other responsible tax stakeholders such as tax authorities, NGOs, responsible tax practice accreditation bodies, consumers, and many others.
| Date of Award | Jan 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Stuart MacLennan (Supervisor), Panagiotis Andrikopoulos (Supervisor) & Lorenzo Pasculli (Supervisor) |