I have on a couple of occasions mentioned here the tax article that I’ve been working on, when time permits, since late January.  Entitled The New Non-Territorial U.S. International Tax System, it discusses and evaluates three of the main new international tax provisions in the 2017 tax act: the BEAT, GILTI, and FDII.  (This includes attempting to explain, very simply and intuitively rather than technically, what these provisions appear mainly to be “about.”)

I have now completed the piece, and it will be appearing in Tax Notes in two parts, on July 2 and 9.

The two-part publication was necessary due to its length (close to 30,000 words), and made sense due to a natural breakpoint between the two main parts.  The first half focuses on international tax policy conundrums and dilemmas in general, and the second half on the BEAT, GILTI, and FDII in particular.

I put both halves of the analysis in the same article due to their complementarity. One needs the first part in order to ground the evaluation in the second part.  And I think the second part helps show that the normative discussion in the first part is focusing on things that countries actually care about – which cannot comparably be said about standard-fare generalizations regarding, for example, the supposedly central choice between “worldwide” and “territorial” models, neither of which any major industrial country appears to want in its unalloyed entirety.

While I don’t pull my punches in evaluating the BEAT, GILTI, and FDII, the piece is written in a far kinder, more tolerant, and even verging on forgiving, spirit than my piece on the passthrough deduction. I expressly address in the new piece my reasons for taking a different tone here.  I also offer general thoughts regarding how the provisions might be changed or improved, taking the more defensible underlying policy aims as given, albeit without getting into the weeds as some outstanding recent pieces, such as this one, have.

On July 23, with Tax Notes’ permission, I will be posting the article on SSRN. Evidently I’m fine with losing a few downloads under the official count, in exchange for having, I hope, significantly more actual readers.

I’ll also be discussing the piece in Vienna on June 13, in Oxford at the end of June, in Ann Arbor on October 24, and in Copenhagen on November 5. (Time permitting, I’d be happy to add, say, Australia, New Zealand, China, or Japan to the tour, assuming roundtrip business class tickets, but no one has as yet asked.)