Taxing Global Digital Commerce

The term e-commerce – the use of computer networks to facilitate transactions involving the production, distribution, sale, and delivery of goods and services in the marketplace – has grown from merely streamlining relations between consumer and business to a much more robust phenomenon embracing efficient business processes within a firm and between firms. Inevitably, the related taxation issues have grown too.

This latest edition of the preeminent text on the taxation of electronic transactions – formerly titled Electronic Commerce and International Taxation (1999) and Electronic Commerce and Multijurisdictional Taxation (2001) – revises, updates, and expands the book’s coverage, reorganizes its presentation, and adds several new chapters.

It includes a detailed and up-to-date analysis of VAT developments regarding e-commerce, and explores the implications of e-commerce for the US state and local sales and use tax regime. It discusses developments in Europe and the United States while enlarging its focus to include the tax treatment of e-commerce in China, India, Canada, Australia, and throughout the world.

Analysing the practical tax consequences of e-commerce from a multijurisdictional and multitax perspective, the book offers in-depth treatment of such topics as the following:

• how tax rules governing cross-border e-commerce are increasingly applied to all cross-border activities;
• how tax rules and processes developed to confront challenges posed by e-commerce provoke optimal tax policy;
• how technology enhances tax and cross-border information exchanges;
• how technology lowers both compliance and enforcement costs;
• consumption tax issues raised by cloud computing; and
• different approaches to the legal design of VAT place of taxation rules, with examples.

This edition, while building on earlier editions’ analysis of the relationship between traditional tax laws and the Internet, contains a more explicit and systematic consideration of e-commerce issues as well as the ongoing policy responses to them. Tax professionals and academics everywhere will welcome the giant step it takes towards the design of multijurisdictional tax regimes that are both conceptually sound and practical in implementation.