General Anti-Avoidance Rules Revisited: Reflections on Tim Edgar's "Building a Better GAAR"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In addition to the requirement of a tax benefit or advantage, the application of most modern general anti-avoidance rules (GAARs) turns on two elements: a "subjective element," which considers the purpose for which the transaction or arrangement resulting in the tax benefit or advantage was undertaken or arranged; and an "objective element," which considers the object or purpose of the relevant provisions to determine whether the tax benefit resulting from the transaction or arrangement is consistent with this object or purpose. Although these two elements are present in most modern GAARs, the function of each element within these rules and the relationship between them are often poorly understood. Other unresolved issues concern the roles of artificiality and economic substance in the application of these rules, and the relationship, if any, between these concepts and the "subjective" and "objective" elements of the rules. A final set of issues involves the uncertainty that GAARs may engender, the ability of judges to apply these rules and principles in a coherent and consistent manner, and the compatibility of these rules and principles with the rule of law. The author addresses these issues by reflecting on Tim Edgar's article "Building a Better GAAR." The first part of the paper considers the rationale for a general anti-avoidance rule or principle, arguing that such a rule not only represents a useful policy response to the harmful consequences of tax avoidance (the consequentialist argument that Professor Edgar espoused), but also may be justified on the non-consequentialist grounds that it protects the integrity of the provisions at issue and thereby upholds the rule of law. In the second part of the paper, the author builds on this analysis to consider the design of a general anti-avoidance rule or principle, arguing that it should be codified in the form of an explicit rule, should include subjective and objective elements such as the "purpose" and "misuse or abuse" requirements in the Canadian GAAR, and should be informed by concepts of artificiality and economic substance that apply to, respectively, the subjective and objective elements of the rule.
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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 | 0.029 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.065 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.032 | 0.051 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".