About Nick Shaxson
Economist: why it’s time to stop making debt tax-deductible
We’ve said this before, and we may have felt radical saying it at the time – but now it’s The Economist saying it. It has an article entitled and subtitled A senseless subsidy: Most Western economies sweeten the cost of borrowing. That is a bad idea. Quite so. And the potential rewards it outlines from doing so are incredible. There are the tax revenues,
Read the full article…Tax wars: seminar at European parliament
A seminar at the European parliament in Brussels, featuring TJN’s Markus Meinzer: TweetShare
Farewell, Margaret Hodge
Margaret Hodge, the fiery head of the UK’s Public Accounts Committee, has been hauling the bosses of large multinational corporations over the coals for their egregious abuses of the UK tax system. Now, post-election, she is stepping down. Many tax professionals in the UK dislike, hate, or even loathe her. That is essentially because she has fought against their interests, in the public
Read the full article…Bill Gates: corporate tax rates at 35% won’t stop the innovators
Via the Fools’ Gold blog: A Bloomberg report on a Bill Gates interview: ‘Gates scoffed at comparisons linking taxes and regulation to slower growth. “The idea that there’s some direct connection, that all these innovators are on strike because tax rates are at 35 percent on corporations, that’s just such nonsense.” ‘ also: “The highest economic growth decade was the 1960s. Income tax
Read the full article…Financial Secrecy Index: new academic paper
Cross-posted with the Uncounted blog: a forthcoming paper in Economic Geography. The Financial Secrecy Index is the Tax Justice Network’s flagship index of secrecy jurisdictions, or ‘tax havens’. The idea emerged from discussions at the World Social Forum in Nairobi, in January 2007. In part, it came from frustration with a popular view of corruption as a ‘poor country’ problem – when
Read the full article…Should tax targets for post-2015 be rejected?
From Alex Cobham, TJN Research Director, writing at Uncounted: “In a strident blog at the International Centre for Tax and Development, Mick Moore, Nora Lustig, Richard Bird, Nancy Birdsall, Odd-Helge Fjeldstad, Richard Manning and Wilson Prichard have called for the rejection of post-2015 tax targets. (Full disclosure – I work with the ICTD, including on the Government Revenue Dataset.) Seven leading thinkers on development and
Read the full article…Auditor rotation: the new merry-go-round
From Prof. Prem Sikka, via email: “Auditing itself has become one of the biggest frauds of modern times. When was the last time company auditors drew attention to fiddles, tax dodging, money laundering or their own complicity in financial misdemeanours? The penalties for delivering duff audits, as demonstrated by the banking crash, are virtually non-existent. Instead of any fundamental reforms
Read the full article…A short FAQ on the European Parliament’s probe into tax rulings
We have just mentioned a demonstration today in Luxembourg, in the context of a visit there by the European Parliament committee tasked with following up on the LuxLeaks affair. (It’s known as “The Committee on Tax Rulings and Other Measures Similar in Effect” or TAXE for short.) Christian Hallum of Eurodad has now kindly provided, via email, a report on what this body is and how
Read the full article…Tax Justice demonstration in Luxembourg as EU tax body visits
Update 2: with a report on the demonstration in Luxemburger Wort, which in contrast to our earlier experiences of Luxembourg media, was quite balanced. Update1 : with a photo (below) of today’s protest in Luxembourg. Some 50-60 people are reckoned to have attended, a good turnout in tiny, financially captured Luxembourg. The Dodgy Duchy of Luxembourg, like many small secrecy jurisdictions, can be a
Read the full article…Tax Justice Focus – the Gender edition
We are delighted to announce the latest edition of our quarterly newsletter,Tax Justice Focus. This is The Gender Edition, and it is guest edited by Liz Nelson of TJN. It complements a new “Gender” page we’ve just opened up, where these materials will be permanently stored. TweetShare
Is France’s economy really less ‘competitive’ than Britain’s?
This post is just a reminder, really, about all the nonsense that is spoken in the name of ‘competitiveness.’ Of course, this is just quarterly data, and the UK was recently growing faster than France. We aren’t going to get into details in this short blog. TweetShare
Report: Tax havens cost Egypt’s treasury billions
From Madamsr.com: “Egypt loses as much as LE5 billion [TJN: that’s over $650 million; there’s also a reference to $2.2 billion in annual trade mispricing] a year in tax revenue due to companies using tax havens to shield profits from taxes, according to a new report from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). The practice also distorts figures for Foreign Direct
Read the full article…Will UK’s new government help poor countries fight tax haven secrecy?
The United Kingdom is, in many respects, the most important single player in the world of offshore tax havens (or secrecy jurisdictions.) It has many offshore characteristics itself, and it runs a network of partly-British havens, whose laws it can strike down when it really wants to. So it is significant that Britain has had an election, which saw a Liberal Democrat/Conservative coalition replaced
Read the full article…How to threaten politicians, the City of London way
This article is all about the language of financial lobbying. The consensus that an “oversized financial centre is indispensible” is strong and at times brutally in-your-face in many countries with oversized financial centres. But this consensus can also be sophisticated and subtle, when needs be. Here’s an example of one of the more subtle bits of lobbying by the City of London, helpfully carried by the Financial Times. The
Read the full article…Do real investors chase corporate tax cuts?
Cross-posted with Fools’ Gold. From the Financial Times, a report on a survey by the Tolley Tax Journal of businesses’ responses to the UK’s policy of savage cuts to the corporate income tax. It’s about the UK, but it has wide international relevance. “More than six out of 10 respondents thought the cut in the corporate tax rate, by 8 percentage points
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