Irma Mosquera appointed as Associate Professor
As of 1 January 2018 Irma Mosquera will be appointed as Associate Professor at the Institute of Tax Law and Economics of Leiden University.
In 2007, Irma Mosquera obtained her PhD (cum laude) at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She is a qualified Colombian lawyer. Until 2017, Irma Mosquera worked at the IBFD as a Senior Research Associate and as a tax advisor at Hamelink & Van den Tooren. She has also worked as a tax advisor at PwC in the Netherlands and as an assistant professor at the University of Utrecht. Irma has been a speaker on tax law issues at several conferences and seminars in Europe, Latin America and the United States. Her areas of expertise are international tax law and comparative tax law in developed and developing countries. She is also a member of the International Fiscal Association and the Dutch Fiscal Association and a member of the international research DeSTaT project: ’Sustainable Tax Governance in Developing Countries through Global Tax Transparency’ (funded by the Norwegian Research Council). She has published several articles in peer-reviewed and non peer-reviewed journals.
As of 1 January 2018, she will be working as an Associate Professor of Tax Law.
ERC Project GLOBTAXGOV
In this ERC project Irma Mosquera will be investigating issues of global governance and tax lawmaking in 12 countries: the United States, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, Ireland, Australia, Colombia, Senegal, Nigeria, South Africa, India and Singapore.
The overall aim of this research project is to assess the feasibility and legitimacy of the current model of global tax governance and the role of the OECD and EU in international tax lawmaking. Unlike the former OECD projects that only provide for an exchange of information between countries, in the BEPS Project, the EU Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive, the EU state aid investigations and the EU External Strategy, the OECD and the EU focus on substantive issues that when implemented will change the international tax architecture of developed and developing countries. These initiatives aim to ensure that governments engage in fair competition and that multinationals pay their fair share. Even though these objectives are legitimate, these developments raise the questions what is the role of the OECD and the EU in global tax governance? and, under what conditions can the model of global tax governance be feasible and legitimate for both developed and developing countries? These initiatives have generated tensions between developed and developing countries and between EU and third (non-EU) countries. The tensions call for the articulation of a new framework of global tax governance that is legitimate and based on considerations of fairness for all countries participating. Against this background, the project will first assess the feasibility of the legal transplant of the BEPS minimum standards into the tax systems of 12 countries of research by asking three sub-questions: (i) why are these countries participating in the BEPS Project? (ii) how will the BEPS minimum standards be transplanted into the tax system of these countries? and (iii) how can the differences in tax systems and tax cultures of these countries influence the content of these minimum standards? In the following step the conditions for legitimacy of the role of the OECD and the EU will be provided in light of the theories of legitimacy and governance.
Dr. Irma Mosquera-Valderrama: “I am looking forward to working in Leiden and working on this project using all the expertise in governance, development and international taxation available at Leiden University. This is a multidisciplinary project and therefore I will need as much cooperation as possible.”