About Nick Shaxson
World’s biggest monopolist pays negative taxes
Via the Washington Post: According to an analysis by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP,) a leading US tax justice group, Amazon got a $129 million tax rebate last year, equivalent to a minus one per cent US federal tax rate, its second year running of negative taxes. (Its effective tax rate there was 3.0 per cent from 2009-18,
Read the full article…How Brexit may deepen the Finance Curse
The evidence is now incontrovertible that finance-dependent countries like Britain are suffering from a bad case of the finance curse. The simplest proposition here is that countries with little financial sector development need more finance, but only up to a certain optimal point, after which growth in finance or a financial sector tends to damage economic growth and suffer a range
Read the full article…Quote of the day – accountants “not set up to look for fraud.”
Following the acrimonious collapse of a British cake business, Patisserie Valerie, a quote of the day from a top accountant: We’re not looking for fraud, we’re not looking at the future, we’re not giving a statement that the accounts are correct . . . we are looking in the past and we are not set up to look for fraud.” What
Read the full article…It’s time to tax wealth properly
Wealth taxes are now rising fast up the global political agenda. For OECD countries, taxes on “property” have declined as a share of all taxes, from close to eight percent of all taxes in the 1960s, to a little over five percent in 1980, a level at which they have stagnated ever since. TweetShare
The Finance Curse and the £4.5 trillion hit to the UK economy
The Finance Curse, a concept first developed by John Christensen and Nicholas Shaxson for TJN, is now the subject of a Long Read article in The Guardian. The article mentions a new study by Andrew Baker of the University of Sheffield, Gerald Epstein of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Juan Montecino of Columbia University, estimating that the UK has
Read the full article…Leaving Jersey – an island cursed by finance
The Tax Justice Network was set up in 2003, after three Jerseyfolk, Pat Lucas, Jean Andersson and Frank Norman, traveled to London to see John Christensen, the island’s former economic adviser. Christensen had left the island in 1998, appalled at the corruption and malfeasance he had encountered every day, and they knew it. They pleaded with him to to “rescue our
Read the full article…Fintech, hotbed of offshore deregulation and crime
Reuters has just published an article titled Swiss watchdog to propose looser anti-money laundering rules for fintechs. (Fintech is short for “financial + technology” and it is about bringing technology into the financial sector.) Switzerland’s move is, apparently: part of a drive to boost innovation and shore up the country’s position as a leading money management hub.” For the appropriate context
Read the full article…Tax “stability” short-changes Burkina Faso
A couple of years ago we wrote a blog entitled Beware the siren song of “tax certainty, which took apart a widespread consensus that it is important for countries to embrace ‘tax certainty’ and ‘stability.’ These motherhood-and-apple-pie terms hide a world of mischief: not least the fact that this ‘certainty’ is usually a one-way ratchet. In other words, companies love the ‘certainty’
Read the full article…Switzerland seen backing down on supporting tax haven USA
In July we wrote a blog entitled Luxembourg backing down on supporting tax haven USA. Now it’s Switzerland’s turn. This concerns the OECD’s Common Reporting Standard (CRS,) a global scheme to share banking information. The United States isn’t a participating jurisdiction: it has its own FATCA project, which as we’ve remarked before, is good at ferreting out US taxpayers overseas, but provides
Read the full article…Beware the siren song of “tax certainty”
Back in July the G20 club of powerful countries issued a communiqué in which they enthused about “the benefits of tax certainty to promote investment and trade,” and they mandated the OECD and the IMF “to continue working on the issues of pro-growth tax policies and tax certainty.” It’s taken as a given that something called ‘tax certainty’ is a wholesome thing. Here’s
Read the full article…Quote of the day – the future of tax havens
From Joseph Stiglitz, writing in Vanity Fair: “It will not be long before those nations that opt to continue with old-style secrecy will be labeled pariah states and be cut off from the global financial system.” New and abusive games will continue to emerge to fill the vacuum left by old-style secrecy — including new forms of opacity — but he’s certainly
Read the full article…OECD threatens Bahamas with blacklisting, Bahamas wilts
The Spanish newspaper El Mundo is running an article in Spanish, whose headline translates as “If Bahamas goes on like this, it will go onto the G20 blacklist” – and the text in quote marks comes from Pascal Saint-Amans, head of tax at the OECD, the club of rich countries. The Bahamas has been in the news recently: first, we
Read the full article…UN report recommends: go after tax havens, and protect whistleblowers
From the United Nations General Assembly, the fifth report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order. The summary goes like this: “The report focuses on impacts of taxation on human rights and explores the challenges posed to the international order by widespread tax avoidance, tax evasion, tax fraud and profit shifting, facilitated by
Read the full article…Ecuador’s president calls for global tax body
Updated with additional information about Correa’s administration and exposés in the Panama Papers scandal; scroll down. Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa has published a significant statement about international tax governance, and specifically the prospect of creating a global tax organisation. This is particularly important, given that Ecuador has just assumed the presidency of the G77 group of developing countries. “A rapidly growing
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