Policy Forum: Tax Evasion--Does Anyone Know What It Means? Does Anyone Really Care?

Joel Nitikman ()
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Joel Nitikman: Dentons Canada LLP, Vancouver

Canadian Tax Journal, 2017, vol. 65, issue 3, 681-692

Abstract: Tax avoidance and tax evasion are always in the news and never more so than these days, with the Panama papers making front-page headlines around the world. Unfortunately, the definitions of "avoidance" and "evasion," particularly the former, are both elusive and amorphous; each speaker or writer on the subject has his or her own (often unspoken and usually unformed) definitions in mind when using the terms. This article, in a very non-technical way, discusses these concepts and suggests that they are not, in reality, that difficult to define. The real difficulty is in determining the situations to which they should be applied and (more cynically) who is doing the applying to whom.

Keywords: Tax evasion; tax avoidance; tax planning; disclosure; compliance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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