The UK's All Party Parliamentary Group on Tax has published a report entitled A more responsible global tax system or a ‘sticking plaster’? An examination of the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) process and recommendations. They consulted us (among many others) and the result is a … [Read more...]
Taxing corporations
Finally, trade misinvoicing gets political
We recently helped publicise a report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in our blog entitled Some countries “lose” 2/3 of exports to misinvoicing. As a reminder, trade misinvoicing is a form of money laundering that involves deliberately misreporting (on an invoice to customs) … [Read more...]
Guest blog: involve developing countries more in international tax co-operation
After Panama: developing countries need to be involved more closely in international co-operation on tax issues A guest blog by Christian von Haldenwang, German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) Bonn, July 4, 2016 - Two major mechanisms squeeze the tax … [Read more...]
New questions over Juncker’s role in Amazon Luxembourg affair
Jean-Claude, Juncker, the President of the European Commission, has long tried to distance himself from his role as one of the key architects of Luxembourg's crime-fueled tax haven factory. An excellent new investigation by Newsweek now reminds us of his efforts to display whiter-than-white … [Read more...]
Top tax expert: Big 4 “accountants of fortune” must be broken up
In March The Economist magazine rang alarm bells (again) about a rise in concentrated market power: a problem where the biggest firms get ever bigger and more like monopolies, making it easy to extract wealth from the rest of us (as opposed to creating wealth.) This, in turn fosters steeper … [Read more...]
Anti-tax, anti-regulation sirens already emerging after Brexit
Just before the Brexit vote we quoted Adam Posen, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, about what might happen in a post-Brexit Britain: "If you’re anti-regulation fantasists to begin with, you start going down the path, ‘Oh we can become an even more offshore center. We … [Read more...]
Brexit gets worse as London seeks to wriggle free from UK
Cross-posted from Fools' Gold. We have our own particular reasons for disliking Brexit - the recent decision by the UK to leave the European Union. In a pre-Brexit analysis we quoted Adam Posen, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, who articulated what is probably … [Read more...]
More unfair tax treaties may be renegotiated
This time it's Uganda. From Martin Hearson: "The government announced in its latest budget that it has finished formulating its new tax treaty policy, and will be renegotiating treaties that don't comply. Seatini and ActionAid Uganda will no doubt chalk this up as a success." In … [Read more...]
Are European Union finance ministers about to deliver another stitch-up on corporate tax?
Update 3, June 21. The EU Press Release is here. Scornful comments continue to circulate. Update 2: This blog is turning into a series of updates in *italics*, with the original background discussion in plain text underneath. Currently, the situation is uncertain - two hours ago, Jeroen … [Read more...]
New paper: Taxing Multinational Enterprises as Unitary Firms
A new paper by TJN Senior Adviser Sol Picciotto, for the International Center for Tax and Development (ICTD). Summary: This paper explores the issues raised for international tax rules of explicitly treating multinational enterprises (MNEs) as single or unitary firms. It first briefly explains … [Read more...]
More sordid details about the Luxembourg tax cheat factory
If you read one story today, read this, from Private Eye. A couple of small excerpts reveal the extent to which tax havens like Luxembourg are 'captured states": Applications for the favourable rulings, Halet told the court, were sent every Wednesday at 1.30pm in batches of 30 to 40 and returned … [Read more...]
Mauritius: India cracks down on a major tax evasion route
Update on this story available below on more recent developments India cracks down on a major tax evasion route A guest blog by Abdul Muheet Chowdhary The issue My award winning essay, written for a competition jointly held by the Tax Justice Network and Oxfam International, focused on how … [Read more...]
In the dock: Antoine Deltour, Edouard Perrin – or Luxembourg?
Who is in the dock? The whistleblowers? Or the tax haven of Luxembourg and PWC, the multinational that has been behind this trial? … [Read more...]
Irish Times: US taxpayers growing tired of Ireland’s one big idea
That one big idea isn't corporate tax avoidance - though one might be forgiven for thinking so. It's Foreign Direct Investment, or FDI. As we've shown, FDI into Ireland, and the so-called "Celtic Tiger, was primarily not driven by tax and corporate tax avoidance. Really, it wasn't. Now Fintan … [Read more...]
Graph of the day: the broken U.S. tax system
From Oxfam America's new report Broken at the Top: How America’s dysfunctional tax system costs billions in corporate tax dodging: Now read on. … [Read more...]
