Columbia Business School Talks Taxing Multinational Corporations
The first step toward social responsibility is, arguably, fair taxation. There’s just one problem—for years, multinational corporations have raced to pay the fewest taxes or avoid paying it altogether. For example, Apple employs a few hundred people in Ireland, so it falls under the .005 percent tax bracket. And Apple isn’t the only multinational company to do so.
San Diego Professor Argues Against Corporate Human Rights Abuse
Just because a person means business, they shouldn’t be expected to fight on the behalf of corporations.
At the University of San Diego School of Business Administration, one professor is making the case that the courts should hold corporations accountable. Professor Richard Custin‘s new scholarly article, “Legal Remedies For Corporate Abuses of Human Rights (Jesner v. Arab Bank),” argues for the use of the Alien Tort Act and Supreme Court to take corporations to court. He doesn’t want to see corporations walking away from poor business transactions without seeing consequences. What better place than U.S. courts? This is true even if a corporation harms a foreign person not in the United States.
The professor writes:
“Congress could amend the [Alien Tort Act] to specifically include corporations. We expect that the Supreme Court in Jesner will finally answer the question of whether corporations are liable under the ATS. A finding by the Supreme Court that corporations are liable under the ATS will serve to hold financial institutions accountable for failing to detect unethical financial transactions. Eleanor Roosevelt’s wisdom that “we will be the sufferers if we let great wrongs occur without exerting ourselves to correct them” is as applicable today as it was for the “greatest generation” in World War II.”
In a broader sense, harsher punishment towards corporate abuse has been a particularly difficult subject for decades, especially since the Great Recession. The Week‘s Ryan Cooper outlined much of problem in the financial industry and why repeated efforts to punish companies has fallen short.
Custin is a Clinical Professor of Business Law and Ethics at the school. He is also an attorney and owns a law office. This expertise makes business law, mediation, health law, medical malpractice, and legal research his areas of expertise. Perhaps he can now add “human rights” to his resume.
The article was published in this year’s Kroc Peace Magazine. The SCOTUSblog also mentioned the piece in its Oct. 3 round-up.
UC Davis Professor Weighs In on Women in Large Public Companies
Amanda Kimball, UC Davis Graduate School of Management research specialist, weighed in on women in large public companies in a recent Sacramento Bee article. Kimball has authored the last five annual studies of women in top positions at the top 400 largest corporations in California.
The article looked at the increasing trend of women-owned firms in Sacramento, something that is also happening across California and the United States at large. The number of women-owned firms in Sacramento is up to 59,200 from 56,700 in 2014, according to the 2015 “State of Women-Owned Businesses Report” commissioned by American Express OPEN. The report also showed an increase in revenue in women-owned businesses from $8.5 billion in 2014 to $9.4 billion in 2015.
In spite of this evidence of more and more women succeeding in the world of business, women tended to not fare as well when working in large public corporations. The latest “Study of California Women Business Leaders” showed that women only hold approximately one in nine executive and board positions among California’s largest 400 public companies and continue to earn less than their male peers.
However, Kimball believes that this inequality in large public companies may have helped the trend of women-owned firms in Sacramento. “I think it’s possible that women who were frustrated in the public corporate world are turning around and starting their own companies,” she said in the article. When asked if she thought that female-operated firms will grow to the point where they start affecting the status quo of female corporate leadership, she responded, “I think that if it happens, it will be a long process.”
