About Alex Cobham
Country by country reporting for the Sustainable Development Goals
I had the honour this week of addressing ISAR35, the 35th annual session of the UN’s Intergovernmental Working Group of Experts on International Standards of Accounting and Reporting (all presentations are available here; my slides are also below). The focus was on developing a framework to carry the logic of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into a set of core indicators
Read the full article…How the UK can raise £2.5bn from tax-avoiding multinationals today
15 years ago the Tax Justice Network proposed that multinational companies be required to report publicly on their operations, profits and taxes paid in each country where they operate. Our aim was to bring the transparency of the world’s biggest economic actors more in line with that of individual companies operating in a single country. Tax expert Richard Murphy wrote
Read the full article…UNCTAD journal highlights tax thought leadership
We’re delighted to share a guest blog from Bruno Casella of UNCTAD (the UN Conference on Trade and Development), highlighting the newest edition of their journal Transnational Corporations, which we heartily recommend (and our paper on the history and use of Country-by-Country Reporting will be published soon…) As Bruno lays out below, this edition showcases some of the most important
Read the full article…Progress on global profit shifting: no more hiding for jurisdictions that sell profit shifting at the expense of others
The world’s largest economic actors are also the least transparent. Multinational companies and their big four advisers have been so effective in lobbying for opacity that their reporting requirements are actually less than is required from even small and medium-sized, purely domestic businesses. But change is coming… The OECD has confirmed today that from late 2019 it will start publishing
Read the full article…UK to introduce 5th Anti-Money Laundering Directive: eyes turn to Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories
The UK government has confirmed to campaigning MP Margaret Hodge that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK will introduce the major tax transparency measures in the European Union’s 5th anti money laundering directive. As the Guardian highlights, these include the following crucial measures: Public registers of company owners in every member state; Access to the names of the beneficiaries of trusts for
Read the full article…Could the World Trade Organisation see a challenge to tax havenry?
The Open Society Justice Initiative, part of the Open Society Foundations, focuses on strategic litigation possibilities that can have catalytic impact on achieving human rights around the world. Recently, they’ve been looking at the idea of a World Trade Organisation challenge, in the name of tax justice. Ben Batros is a consultant on international law, accountability, and human rights who
Read the full article…Objetivo 2030: los flujos financieros ilícitos
Las últimas dos décadas han visto el surgimiento de un poderoso movimiento de justicia fiscal a nivel mundial, liderado por la experiencia de la sociedad civil y cada vez más por los responsables políticos del Sur global. Un indicador significativo del progreso ha sido el establecimiento de un objetivo para abordar los flujos financieros ilícitos, incluida la evasión fiscal en
Read the full article…Targeting illicit financial flows in the Sustainable Development Goals
The last two decades have seen the emergence of a powerful tax justice movement globally, led by civil society expertise and increasingly by policymakers of the global South. One significant marker of progress has been the establishment of a target to address illicit financial flows, including offshore tax evasion and the tax avoidance of multinational companies, as part of the
Read the full article…TJN annual conference: Full programme and registration
We’re delighted to present the full programme for the Tax Justice Network’s annual conference – available to download now. The conference, jointly hosted this year with FES and Latindadd, in Lima on 13-14 June, will take place with Spanish, Portuguese and English interpreters. Registration is still open, and we’re expecting a fantastic coming together of the tax justice movement’s activists and
Read the full article…TJN annual conference #tjn18: Full programme and registration
We’re delighted to present the full programme for the Tax Justice Network’s annual conference – available to download now. The conference, jointly hosted this year with FES and Latindadd, in Lima on 13-14 June, will take place with Spanish, Portuguese and English interpreters. Registration is still open, and we’re expecting a fantastic coming together of the tax justice movement’s activists and
Read the full article…COFFERS tax course: Register now
We’re delighted to announce that registration is now open for a short course in tax at the Copenhagen Business School, being run as part of the COFFERS project (Combating Financial Fraud and Empowering Regulators). The programme runs from 12-14 September 2018. It features many of the leading international tax researchers who participate in COFFERS, and is designed to provide a
Read the full article…Making history: an end to anonymous companies in the UK’s Overseas Territories
The UK Parliament today has taken a significant step toward global tax transparency – by imposing public registers of beneficial ownership of companies on the UK’s Overseas Territories (OTs). The OTs are relatively small but highly secretive financial centres, responsible for just over 4% of the global provision of financial services to non-residents – but nearly twice that share of
Read the full article…The bell tolls for arm’s length pricing
Listen closely, and you might just hear the beginning of the end of the international rules that have made tax more or less voluntary for multinational companies. This weekend, as part of their regular spring meetings, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank will hold a day-long conference on the leading alternative: unitary taxation with formulary apportionment. Long promoted by
Read the full article…Advance tax rulings: Publish or abolish?
Advance(d) tax rulings give multinationals a degree of certainty – but at what cost to tax justice? A range of cases, largely based on leaked documents rather than public disclosures, reveal two major issues: large revenue losses, and a clear risk of corruption. Would mandatory publication be sufficient to curtail these risks? Or is the entire approach so open to
Read the full article…The B-Team: Lowering the bar for tax transparency?
The B Team, the leading global group for responsible business, has released a report: ‘A New Bar for Responsible Tax‘. To our great sadness, it moves the bar in one direction – towards the bottom. When the B Team first got in touch to discuss their plan to work with major multinationals to establish a new standard of tax transparency,
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