<i>Halifax</i> and <i>Cadbury Schweppes</i>: one single European theory of abuse in tax law?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Until now abuse in tax law in the European Single Market has been a matter that was dealt with in many different ways.In income tax the two Directives on cross-border dividends and interests refer the matter to national and treaty anti-abuse provisions.The Merger Directive contains a specific anti-abuse provision with a wording that is different from some national and treaty anti-abuse provisions.In the Sixth VAT Directive there is no single anti-abuse provision.Finally outside taxation there is a flourishing theory of abuse of Community law, but apparently tax lawyers prefer to spend their time in their own garden instead of visiting the garden of Community law and learning something from the flowers that are growing there.Particularly regarding income tax abuse, Community law has not been used as a serious concept that might be useful in protecting national income tax systems.In some cases national tax administrations tried to use the argument of abuse as a justification for national tax measures infringing upon one of the four fundamental freedoms.However in doing so the national tax administrations were always making the argument from the point of view of abuse of national tax law, never from the point of view of abuse of European Community law.As a consequence, in most cases, the national anti-abuse arguments have been overshooting their targets from the point of view of European Community law and therefore have been struck down by the ECJ.This state of affairs may now have changed because of two recent ECJ decisions: Halifax plc v Commissioners of Customs and Excises (C-255/02, 21 February 2006) and Cadbury Schweppes plc v Commissioners (C-196/04, 12 September 2006).Halifax is a VAT decision and Cadbury Schweppes is a corporate income tax decision, involving litigation in two totally different fields of taxation.Therefore the facts in these cases, interesting as they may be, are less relevant than the concept of abuse developed by the ECJ.Both cases deal with the concept of abuse of law not from a national law point of view, but applied from a point of view of European Community law: the Sixth VAT Directive in Halifax and the Treaty freedoms in Cadbury Schweppes.Therefore these decisions open the interesting perspective that the ECJ may finally come around to a coherent general theory of abuse of law that extends in a consistent way the notion of abuse of Community law to all tax matters.At the same time these theories may provide an instrument to protect the integrity of national tax systems, something which the Member States have been desperately and, so far, rather unsuccessfully trying to do, by using the argument of the cohesion of the national tax system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".