인버전(Inversion)이 미국 조세제도에 미치는 영향에 대한 고찰

Tax inversion, or corporate inversion, is the relocation of a corporation's headquarters to a lower-tax nation, or corporate haven, usually while retaining its material operations in its higher-tax country of origin. The term ‘inversion' is most frequently used in relation to US corporations. More recently, publicity has focused on corporate inversions conducted by way of merger with companies in lower-tax foreign countries. The issue was first subjected to a great deal of publicity in April 2014 by the proposed merger between Pfizer and AstraZeneca. A new wave of inversions began in the late 1990s. In response to highly publicized inversions, Congress enacted section 7874 as part of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. Section 7874 potentially taxes inverted companies and some shareholders upon an expatriation transaction. But there is one type of inversion transaction that the statute has not shut down. It involves a substantive merger between a U.S. company and a foreign company in which the shareholders of the domestic company hold less than 80 percent (or 60 percent) of the shares of the new entity after the transaction. Unlike the single reincorporations of the late 1990s, these merger transactions are real business combinations. Tax inversions have become a public policy issue, as those transactions likely cause substantial tax revenue losses and have an undesirable effect on U.S. economy. American politicians and government officials, including President Barack Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, have issued statements calling U.S. multinationals' ‘citizenship renouncement' by tax inversions ‘unpatriotic', and various proposals have been discussed to prevent tax inversions. Finally, in September 22, 2014, U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service issued a notice(IRS Notice 2014-52) that takes targeted action to reduce the tax benefit of corporate tax inversions. The U.S. corporate income tax rate is 35percent, which is much higher than corporate tax rates in most other countries. And the United States is one of the last remaining countries to use a worldwide system. According to the supporters of inversion, the combination of these two key attributes of the U.S. tax system penalizes U.S. multinationals relative to their foreign competitors and has encouraged a wave of inversions. Scholars who criticizes tax inversion contend that most U.S. multinationals don't pay anywhere near 35 percent, and suggest that companies are so clever with ‘aggressive tax planning' technologies that many of them are able to take full advantage of the current system, which make them more competitive than their foreign rivals. As this heated debate on inversion in U.S. involves the U.S. tax system as well as international taxation system, I believe that the inversion issue in U.S. will give us insights into what the good system for international tax competitiveness would be like.