“After the revelations of the ‘Pandora Papers’, it is high time to take action”

Chronic. After “LuxLeaks” in 2014, the “Panama Papers” in 2016, the “Paradise Papers” in 2017, the revelations of the “Pandora Papers”, resulting from a new leak of 12 million documents from offshore finance, show how much the wealthiest continue to evade taxes. Contrary to what is sometimes put forward, there is no reliable indicator that allows us to say that the situation has improved over the past ten years. Before summer, the ProPublica site had revealed that American billionaires paid almost no taxes compared to how much they got rich and what the rest of the population pays. According to Challenges, the first 500 French fortunes jumped from 210 billion euros, to more than 730 billion, between 2010 and 2020, and everything suggests that the taxes paid by these great fortunes (information after all fairly simple but that the public authorities still refuse to publish) were extremely low. Should we just wait for the next leaks, or is it not time for the media and citizens to formulate a platform for action and put pressure on governments to resolve the issue systemically?

Read also: “Pandora Papers”: a world dive into the secrets of offshore finance

The basic problem is that we continue, at the beginning of XXIe century, to register and tax heritage on the sole basis of real estate, using the methods and cadastres set up at the beginning of the XIXe century. If we do not give ourselves the means to change this state of affairs, then the scandals will continue, with the risk of a slow disintegration of our social and fiscal pact and the inexorable rise of every man for himself.

Contributory capacity

The important point is that the registration and taxation of assets have always been closely linked. Firstly, because the fact of registering one’s property gives the owner an advantage (that of benefiting from the protection of the legal system), and secondly because only a minimum tax can make registration truly compulsory and systematic. Let us add that the possession of a heritage is also an indicator of the contributory capacity of the people, which explains why the taxation of the heritage has always played a central role in modern tax systems, in addition to the taxation weighing on the flow. of income (flow which can sometimes be manipulated downwards, in particular for very high assets, as ProPublica has shown).

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