Dominic de Cogan is a professor of tax and public law at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge [law.cam.ac.uk] and assistant director of the Centre for Tax Law, with particular research interests in tax history and in the interactions between tax law, government and constitutional law.  Dominic is also the Deputy UK representative to the European Association of Tax Law Professors and a member of the IFS Tax Law Review Committee.

In the wake of the OECD’s BEPS project, there has been an explosion of interest in the closely related question of how tax systems ought to deal with highly mobile individual taxpayers.  The most obvious example of such a taxpayer is a high net-worth individual (HNWI) who can move easily between jurisdictions and whose choice of jurisdiction may be affected by tax rates, reliefs and administrative arrangements, amongst other considerations.  Yet we should not lose sight of taxpayers at the other end of the spectrum such as low-paid migrant workers, who may be paying considerable amounts of tax to their host jurisdiction without the capacity to make informed tax-efficient choices, or who, conversely, might be forced into the informal sector with few realistic opportunities to comply with their formal tax obligations.    

Either way, and as illustrated by recent debates surrounding the abolition of the UK’s preferential regime for non-domiciled individuals, individual mobility creates important challenges for democracy.  Contrary to the US Revolutionary slogan “no taxation without representation”, mobility can amplify the voice of at least some HNWIs even at the expense of revenue-generation (“reduce my tax liability or I shall leave”) at the same time as denying voice to others (“refugees must pay tax but cannot vote”).  In other words, it leads to potentially serious mismatches between taxation and representation.  Nor does citizenship provide any easy answers, despite its importance in signifying membership of political communities.  Citizenship has never been identical to subjection to the tax system (children, for example, are taxable but do not enjoy the full range of citizenship benefits), but in the context of ever-increasing individual mobility it is more difficult than ever to treat it even as a rough proxy for those who ought to be subjected to tax liabilities.  Indeed, tax systems can be expected to have to cope with increasing numbers of non-citizen taxpayers as well as non-taxpaying citizens.

Whether states ought to respond to these challenges with lower expectations of “no taxation without representation”, by making citizenship easier to obtain, by widening the franchise to include a wider range of non-citizens, or in some other way, raises an eye-wateringly complex series of questions that demand attention not only from lawyers but from a myriad of other disciplines.  It is hardly surprising, then, either that there has been a significant upswing in literature dealing with these topics, or that this literature has not yet settled on any consistent recommendations.   The Fiscal Citizenship Project, whose members are represented in the present volume, is perhaps driving the most systematic attempt to build a common vocabulary between disciplines, but it remains at a relatively early stage.

The present volume does not even attempt to compete as a systematic project.  On the contrary, it is gloriously various, representing the complexity of the problems involved as well as the sheer range of insights that are emerging across different jurisdictions and academic backgrounds. This approach is backed up by tolerant editorship that allows authors to speak for themselves rather than repeating an “editorial line”, which seems particularly well-judged in a young research area where the literature is still finding its way.  It encourages, instead of restricting or channelling, the growth of ideas.  All the same, variety is not the same as incoherence, and indeed the editors do an excellent job of drawing together the different strands and ensuring that the volume provides a meaningful and useful experience, whether read from the beginning to the end or dipped into. In this connexion, it is worth noting that both Lind’s introductory chapter and Brøgger and Björklund Larsen’s closing chapter focus on boundaries.  This is hardly a coincidence: the volume is all about boundaries, be they disciplinary, geographical, membership or tax conceptual. 

This neat bracketing of the issues is complemented by the exceptional clarity with which Bamford sets out many of the most relevant political philosophical questions in Chapter 2, which will be helpful for anyone working in this area but could equally be understood by the most recalcitrant first-year undergraduate.  In the following chapters, we read about a proposal for a more sophisticated concept of tax residency that would account for a wider range of life circumstances (Shanan and Narotzki); a new way of conceptualising fiscal citizenship (Schmidt and Matthaei); a proposal for increasing the relevance of tax payments to citizenship applications (Ramos Obando); an analysis of whether distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, if used carefully, might help states to respond to the challenges of taxpayer mobility (Lindsay); a discussion of the citizenship position of corporates (Scherer); the treatment of non-citizens within automated tax risk-management systems (More and Schenke); the importance, and misuse, of taxpayer status in defining political communities (Davis); the anomalous and potentially pointed exemption of agricultural workers in the US from certain fiscal obligations (Sarkar); the different status of taxpayers in the Canadian and Chinese tax systems (Li); and the scope, design and operation of cooperative compliance programmes in Norway and Sweden (Brøgger and Björklund Larsen).

I greatly enjoyed reading this book and would heartily recommend it to anyone who is or who might conceivably be interested in this emerging area of research.  In common with many if not most edited collections, the volume is not entirely even, either in quality or relevance to the topic.  Without wishing to single out any particular author, I sympathised with the attempts to develop theoretical and philosophical frameworks but felt that some were more successful than others.  I also thought that some of the boundary issues, in a field of study replete with boundaries, were presented by authors in a rather over-simplified or at least stylised way; still useful, but perhaps a starting-point for further discussion rather than a destination.   Finally, there is some evidence of “shoehorning” of topics into the scope of the volume, though, in balance, one of my most valuable experiences was realising that the final chapter on cooperative compliance is not at all shoehorned but instead highlights the themes of the book in a new and (for me) unexpected way.

These minor reservations, ironically, highlight one of the things that I enjoyed most about reading this volume, which is its exploratory quality.  It provides a coherent overall experience, as would be expected from editors of this calibre, but it is not overly tidied.  It is suggestive of directions rather than attempting to close down possibilities.  This, in turn, indicates a field of enquiry that is on its way up rather than one that has been answered and is exhausted of inspiration.  This sense of excitement and newness is more than captured in the volume and is one of its real strengths.  Apart from anything, it is fun to read, full of insights and inclusive.  It invites the reader to join in, and it is to be hoped that this invitation is accepted widely.