Synonyms
Tax minimization; Tax mitigation; Tax planning
Introduction
Corporate tax avoidance is generally used as an umbrella term to refer to all tax minimization practices which stay within the legal boundaries. Being characterized as legal, tax avoidance is distinguished from tax evasion, which refers to illegal actions to reduce tax liabilities, typically entailing deception and concealment. In the last decade, the practice of tax avoidance has been subject to intense public and political attention. The media, NGOs, and the general public recurrently scrutinize and “name and shame” companies not only for their illegal tax practices but also when they consider such practices as unfair, outrageous, and/or immoral.
Some major lines of argumentations clearly explain why tax avoidance has become a relevant issue for the business ethics debate, above and beyond the purely legal sphere. First, the nature and functions of corporate tax payments are intrinsically ethical: they correspond to...
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de Colle, S., Scarpa, F. (2023). Ethical Analysis of Tax Avoidance. In: Poff, D.C., Michalos, A.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Business and Professional Ethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22767-8_1091
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22767-8_1091
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