About Nick Shaxson
EU Leaks – a new platform for whistleblowers
From the Greens / Europe Free Alliance in the European Parliament, a new initiative called EU Leaks: EUleaks is a European platform where you can submit information in a highly secure and anonymous way. Transparency and accountability are essential for democratic governance. The EUleaks project provides a platform for increasing transparency by providing a new tool for information in the
Read the full article…Report: new data disproves US corporations’ false narrative on taxes
From Americans for Tax Fairness, a major new report about corporate taxes in the United States. It’s called Corporate Tax Chartbook: How Corporations Rig the Rules to Dodge the Taxes They Owe, and it contains many useful facts, such as this: Corporate profits are way up, and corporate taxes are way down. In 1952, corporate profits were 5.5 percent of the economy, and
Read the full article…Apple’s tax affairs: a symptom of the robber-baron culture
Updated with further information about Brazil’s decision – see below. Now also on Angry Bear, Middle Class Political Economist From the Financial Times: More precisely, a group of 185 American CEOs has sent letters, co-ordinated by the Business Roundtable lobby group, to the leaders of 28 EU member states to try and get the European Commission to row back from claiming
Read the full article…Now Brazil puts Ireland on its tax haven blacklist
We have for years remarked that one of our informal markers of a tax haven is loud tax haven denials. See our ‘we are not a tax haven‘ blog for more. There’s probably no place more vocal than Ireland, where there seems to be a veritable industry of tax haven deniers, which specialises in cherry-picking convenient facts and making a pudding
Read the full article…Quote of the day – tax crimes and traffic offences
From Michael West, an Australian tax journalist: “In Australia, Part 4a of the Tax Act deems that the principal purpose of a transaction should be commercial (rather than tax driven). In light of the proliferation of tax haven activities by Australian companies this law, Part 4a, must be the most highly disregarded and disobeyed law in the nation, perhaps only
Read the full article…Report: why we need to tax corporations now, more than ever
Update: now on Naked Capitalism, where it’s attracted a lot of interesting commentary Last year we published a document entitled Ten Reasons to Defend the Corporate Income Tax, outlining how the tax is under constant attack, in country after country, and explaining why it is one of the most precious of all taxes. Now there’s another fascinating paper, rich in insight
Read the full article…Report: the investor case for country by country reporting
From the FACT coalition: New Report: Investors at Risk by Lack of Corporate Tax Disclosures September 12, 2016 Shareholders Increasingly Stymied by Opaque Corporate Tax Practices as Authorities Crack Down, Finds New FACT Analysis Apple Tax Ruling “Just the Tip of the Iceberg” WASHINGTON, D.C. – Investors are at an increasing risk due to the lack of information disclosed by companies about
Read the full article…More evidence of the links between tax and inequality
The economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, Facundo Alvaredo and Anthony Atkinson have played a big role in helping analyse and popularise the role that tax rate cuts for wealthy folk play in fostering economic inequality, particularly the income shares of the top 1 percent of people compared to everyone else. As they put it in 2013: “The evolution of top tax rates is strongly negatively
Read the full article…The Bahamas tax haven – a (re-)emerging global menace?
Update: as it happens, The Economist has just published an excellent story about the Bahamas, subtitled The Bahamas Cocks a Snook at the War on Tax Dodgers. (Our only beef with that subtitle is that this is about so much more than just tax.) We’ve periodically remarked on the Bahamas as a secrecy jurisdiction of great concern. Like Panama, it’s generally had
Read the full article…Apple’s iPhone 7 launch: but what about the taxes?
Apple is launching its iPhone 7 today. In the context of the recent Apple tax scandal, and the imbroglio involving the company, the European Commission, and the U.S. Treasury, we thought we’d share some images that some of our partners have created, to celebrate the event. Before seeing the images, if you want something to read, perhaps take a look at
Read the full article…On our recent event on beneficial ownership in Buenos Aires
The Second International Conference on Beneficial Ownership Registries took place in Buenos Aires on August 31st and September 1st. The event was held again at Argentina’s Central Bank and was co-organized by the Tax Justice Network, Argentina’s General Prosecution Office (Ministerio Público Fiscal), Fundación SES, Latindadd and the Red de Justicia Fiscal LAC. It was sponsored by Argentina’s Anti-corruption Office.
Read the full article…UK moves forward on Country by Country reporting
They said it would never happen – but here it comes. From the UK lower house of parliament, an amendment to legislation which looks like this: This is very welcome news, even though the amendment is far from perfect. TweetShare
Why reregulation after the crisis is feeble: Shadow banking, offshore financial centers, and jurisdictional ‘competition’
Prof. Thomas Rixen, who has written a lot about tax ‘competition’ (aka tax wars) in the past, has a new article looking at similar dynamics in the area of financial regulation. Entitled Why reregulation after the crisis is feeble: Shadow banking, offshore financial centers, and jurisdictional competition, it points out that the shadow banking sector, many of whose players were implicated
Read the full article…Corporate tax cuts: why the old analyses don’t stack up any more (did they ever?)
Last month Pascal Saint-Amans, head of tax for the OECD, spoke to the Wall Street Journal, in an article subtitled The argument against taxing capital income relatively more than wages is losing its force. He said: “For the past 30 years we’ve been saying don’t try to tax capital more because you’ll lose it, you’ll lose investment. Well this argument is dead,
Read the full article…Public procurement — the next frontier for tax justice campaigning?
This guest blog by Matti Ylönen is partly based on an academic article Cities as World Political Actors: “Tax haven free cities” initiative and the politics of public procurement. Public procurement — the next frontier for tax justice campaigning? The international movement for tax justice and tackling secrecy jurisdictions has come of age. Many of the demands that were deemed impossible a
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