Remarks from Donald Johnston below:
I should tell you that the OECD began the program with a misnomer, calling it “harmful tax competition”, which, as I recall, was the language actually used in the résumé from the G-7 at the Lyon summit. They used the term “harmful tax competition”.
Well of course that opened the door to those who like to charge the OECD as being a European-controlled organization where people like to pay a lot of tax, where the social contract is financed with taxpayers’ dollars at exorbitant rates. They like to charge that the OECD—when it refers to tax competition—is really saying that everybody should pay the same tax. Well of course nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t know if Jeffrey Owens testified on this point or not, but the OECD, from an economic point of view, had regarded competitive tax rates as being very healthy and that they could be very efficient. So the notion of competition in tax, which backfired in terms of the initial communications on this program, was corrected in 2000 and it became essentially “harmful tax practices”.
