Tax

The diffusion of new telematic technologies has generated profound changes in the contractual typologies drawn up by publishers and offered to academic institutions or purchasing centres. These pose significant tax problems due to the need to demarcate between publishing products and the provision of services. Territoriality for VAT purposes makes the matter more complex in relation to "publication services", the subject of new contractual types being adopted, including "compact" contracts of a transformative nature, concerning continuous services of access/use of online databases and scientific journals and the publication of scientific articles on those databases. The novelty and uncertainty of the reference regulatory framework has led publishers and buyer networks to request multiple opinions from the financial administration through the preventive consultation procedure. This essay examines the solutions offered by administrative practice in order to address the tax problems deriving from the new contractual typologies in the field of electronic journals, in particular outlining the applicable regime for VAT purposes.

Trade globalisation, digitization, the circulation of vast amounts of taxable wealth, and the ease with which elusive practices aimed at diverting taxable material can be implemented today, have greatly affected the rigid legal-tax definitions that, even today, attempt to harness these new forms of highly mobile wealth. In fact, not only do digital enterprises to avoid being rooted in a specific territory take advantage of pre-existing definitions and institutions, created to tax income earned by the so-called traditional economy; but, above all, by using new digital-tools, they directly manage to hide many segments of their activity. In this paper, after a quick review of the history of the digital economy, we will try to offer a hypothetical solution to the still controversial issue of how to tax these highly mobile incomes.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications based on big data have sparked a huge debate among lawyers. The debate has focused on how new interactions mediated by data-driven AI affect different legal principles, challenge existing rules, and require changes in the legal framework. Many traditional fields of law were covered: data protection law, consumer protection law, intellectual property law, etc. This article provides an overview of the challenges and opportunities that lie at the intersection of AI applications and the domain of taxation and tax law. In the first part, the paper examines how current AI-powered economic models reshape the traditional value chain and influence legal concepts in direct and indirect taxation. The second part discusses how AI is applied in different areas of voluntary tax compliance and tax administrations' controls, and how these developments generate new challenges for (tax) law.

On 9th December 2020, the Portuguese Constitutional Court (‘PCC’) referred its first question for preliminary ruling to the Court of Justice of the European Union (‘CJEU’). In a case allegedly entailing the need to balance different Treaty rules such as anti-discriminatory EU tax law (Article 110 TFEU) and environmental protection (Article 191 TFEU), the PCC acknowledged its nature as a court against whose decisions there is no judicial remedy under national law and referred the matter to the CJEU. This ruling shall be read in combination with the judgment in Case no. 422/2020 of 15th July 2020, where the PCC recognized the CJEU’s exclusive competence to interpret and assess the validity of EU law, consequently declaring its lack of jurisdiction to do so. After summarizing the main facts of the case, this article aims at analysing its consequences for the relationship between the PCC and the CJEU.

This paper aims to analyze the sentence T-778/16 of the General Court which has annulled the Decision (EU) 2017/1283 which had condemned Apple Inc. to pay about 13 billion in taxes into the Irish tax coffers, not paid following two “tax rulings”, one in 1991 and one in 2007, stipulated between the Irish tax authorities and Apple in order to define the tax base of the two subsidiaries ASI and AOE located in Irish territory. The analysis, in addition to highlighting the reasons that led the Court to annul the decision, will conclude with a brief reflection on the consequences that the judgment could have on the policy, started by the European Union in 2014, of fighting aggressive taxation practices adopted by some Member States.