The fight against hybrid devices: A necessary step forward

The process of globalization has had the consequence of freeing up borders, thus favoring the movement of people and capital, and in this sense, leading to the development of the phenomenon of tax evasion. This has had the main effect of highlighting the existing asymmetries of the different state tax systems. Taxpayers taking advantage of these asymmetries, using hybrid arrangements, in order to drastically or even totally reduce their tax burden. The fight against these schemes only started very recently, shortly before 2010. It took the influence of the European Union, through the European Commission, for domestic legislations lacking mechanisms, such as France's, to be led to implement within their systems, instruments to fight against hybrid schemes. The fight against hybrid schemes has been accelerating since 2012, thanks in particular to soft law and the numerous OECD reports on the subject, but it has reached a real turning point with the BEPS action plan and the successive signatures of the ATAD and ATAD 2 agreements, in 2016 and 2017 respectively.