Our annual discussion workshop on the theme of Should Nation States Compete? kicks off tomorrow morning in London at 10h00.
The venue is Room C312 in the Tait Building, Northampton Square, London EC1V 0HB – see campus map below.
The nearest underground station is Angel (approximately 7 minutes walk from Northampton Square).
Calling for sustainable government funding for vital public services and an end to corporate tax dodging, members of the world’s largest labour, NGO and faith organizations have united across borders in the first ever Global Week of Action for #TaxJustice, June 16-23, 2015. On the ground public and social media actions have happened in more than 43 countries.
The indefatigable Teresa Marshall, co-ordinator for the Global Alliance for Tax Justice (GATJ), has written this summary of the first global week of action. Continue reading “First global week of action for tax justice hits 43 countries”
Update: this post is now on Naked Capitalism.
Update 2: cop a couple of interesting comments under this blog, including further reading.
Not long after a newspaper editor critical of local financial sector corruption fled the Cayman Islands, followed by apparent “tombstones” death threats, another brave journalist with the Cayman Reporter has published a fiery editorial, which rings true to many of the things we have said in the past:
“The financial industry including the regulators in the Cayman Islands has a parallel universe of their own standards and beliefs. One where it does not matter what the facts are, they say and believe is the surreal reality.”
Continue reading “Cayman papers in rare, savage attacks on UK and financial sector”
In this excerpt from an interview recorded in June 2015, Ross Ashcroft talks with film-maker Harold Crooks (The Corporation, Surviving Progress, The Price We Pay) and TJN’s director, John Christensen, about the threat posed by tax havens to parliamentary democracy. Continue reading “Tax and the Death of Democracy – interview from The Renegade Economist”
This new graph from the IMF is just the latest piece of research that follows on from the in-depth work of Thomas Piketty and others looking at the relationship between top income tax rates and inequality. The graph here makes the point adequately. Put crudely, the lower the top tax rate, the more inequality will rise.
The IMF discussion note is called Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective, and it goes far beyond tax. It was summarised, not inaccurately, in the Pacific Standard, thus:
“The IMF Confirms That ‘Trickle-Down’ Economics Is, Indeed, a Joke”
Continue reading “New IMF research: tax affects inequality; inequality affects growth”
June 2015 Tax Justice Network Podcast:
Continue reading “The Tax Justice Network Podcast, June 2015”
A new report from the OECD (hat tip: Dan Hind) contributes to what is now accepted wisdom in finance-and-growth circles: too much finance is bad for you. Our Finance Curse analysis explores this in detail. This blog is merely a pointer to the OECD study published a few days ago, which states:
“The empirical evidence for OECD countries over the past five decades indicates that more finance is linked to sharply higher growth at low levels of financial development but that, above a certain point and at the margin, further financial expansion is associated with slower growth.”
Continue reading “New OECD report backs TJN’s Finance Curse research”
From ActionAid, another excellent investigation into a corporate tax dodge in Malawi, which on some measures is the world’s poorest country:
Today [June 17] we’ve released an investigation into an Australian mining company called Paladin, operating in Malawi – the world’s poorest country. We found that through using complex corporate structures and negotiating a huge tax break, over the last 6 years, the company has cuts its tax bill by US$43 million.
In one year this could’ve paid for one of the following:
Continue reading “Exposed: $43 million tax dodge in world’s poorest country”
With thanks to GATJ
We have written for years about how the OECD, a club of rich countries has dominated the international tax system and that this inevitably skews the system in the favour of, well, rich countries. A potentially far more representative body exists — the UN Tax Committee — but the OECD and its member states have exerted powerful pressure to restrict its mandate and powers and to ensure that it is under-resourced, given low status, and unable to mount a challenge to rich countries’ needs. Continue reading “10 Reasons Why an Intergovernmental UN Tax Body Will Benefit Everyone”
Via the Global Alliance for Tax Justice:
Organisations are now invited to endorse the Lima Declaration on Tax Justice and Human Rights. Continue reading “Sign on! Lima Declaration on Tax Justice and Human Rights”
Juncker and tax haven Luxembourg. We won’t tire of repeating this one. Hat tip: David Walch
We have often remarked how international tax haven blacklists generally reflect the political powers and influence of nation states; as a result they tend to include ‘minnows’ but not the big fish. (Among other things, this means a lot of econometric studies resting on a baseline of nonsense.)
Continue reading “Juncker’s hidden hand? EU tax haven blacklist omits Luxembourg”
From Andres Knobel
Buenos Aires – On June 10th and 11th, Tax Justice Network together with Argentina’s General Prosecution Office (Ministerio Público Fiscal), Argentina’s Central Bank and other NGOs including Fundación SES, Latindadd and CIPCE hosted a two-day event involving Government and civil society concerning the need for registries of beneficial ownership. The event took place at one of the main halls of Argentina’s Central Bank and was one of the main gatherings of government agencies and NGOs. Continue reading “Agreement in Buenos Aires on need for public registries of beneficial ownership”
17th June 2015 – for immediate release
Today’s Action Plan on Fairer Taxation sees the European Commission stall on transparency while giving tax sweeteners to multinational companies Continue reading “European Commission half measures will exacerbate profit shifting”
A groundbreaking report released Wednesday, June 17 (12:01am) by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), and researched by the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), reveals that Walmart has built a vast, undisclosed network of 78 subsidiaries and branches in 15 overseas tax havens, which may be used to minimize foreign taxes where it has retail operations and to avoid U.S. tax on those foreign earnings. Continue reading “Hey Walmart, it’s time to pay your taxes”
The BEPS Monitoring Group (BMG), a body supported by TJN and led by TJN Senior Adviser Sol Picciotto, is a civil society body monitoring the OECD’s Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project. BEPS is fancy OECD-speak for ‘international corporate tax dodging’.
The platform has now produced a new joint statement, alongside our partners at the Global Alliance for Tax Justice (GATJ): Continue reading “Corporate tax and the OECD: joint statement to the G20”
Alex Cobham, TJN’s esteemed Director of Research
A new post by Alex Cobham, TJN’s Research Director, at Uncounted. It’s called, as our headline suggests, The politics of country-by-country reporting. In summary, the sections note: Continue reading “The politics of country-by-country reporting”
From http://dev.stopletterboxcompanies.eu. Act on June 16, and sign the petition
This blog looks at a report from EurActiv about the so-called Luxleaks probes, which are looking at whether multinational companies using Luxembourg schemes (involving so-called ‘tax rulings’) violated European rules. Jean-Claude Juncker is not only head of the European Commission, but former premier of Luxembourg. Euractiv reports that the tax rulings committee had sought to interview European Commisioner Pierre Moscovici, but it didn’t quite work out like that: Continue reading “Juncker invites himself to Luxleaks hearing”
Fair Tax Pledge
Welcoming the launch of the Fair Tax Pledge –
As described by Richard Murphy:
The Fair Tax Pledge is a new idea from the Fair Tax Mark, of which I’m a director.
The Fair Tax Mark is aimed at those businesses that are run as limited companies but we’ve always known that there are small, unincorporated businesses and many individuals who have wanted to say that they too believe in paying the right amount of tax, in the right place, at the rate rate and at the right time but had no way of doing so. The Fair Tax Pledge puts that right.
The Fair Tax Pledge is open to anyone. It asks that you commit to:
- Declaring all your income and that of any companies or other organisations you’re associated with openly, honestly and on a timely basis;
- Not use tax havens to reduce any tax that you owe;
- Not use marketed or abusive tax avoidance arrangements;
- Not enter into any tax arrangement contrary to the spirit of the law;
- Advise your accountant, if you have one, that you do not want them to do anything contrary to the commitments you have made.
Read more here, and sign the pledge here.
Cross-posted from our sister organisation the Global Alliance for Tax Justice
The Global Week of Action for #TaxJustice, which will take place in June 16-23, 2015, aims to encourage and cross-promote diverse activities that are initiated across our tax justice communities, to increase public pressure on governments across the world. Members and allies of the Global Alliance for Tax Justice are kindly invited to join this initiative and organize or participate in activities in their countries.
Continue reading “Join the Global Week of Action for #TaxJustice, June 16-23”
Continue reading “Should Nation States Compete? Discussion workshop final programme”
Christian Aid sent us this email yesterday, and it’s a shocker. Back in 2013, the G7 made some pretty strong commitments to tax justice, and we said then we’d be watching them carefully to see if they’d deliver. Well, on this evidence, they haven’t: quite the opposite, in fact. It is worth reproducing Christian Aid’s press release in full:
