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:
The front page of the Cayman Compass, Monday 8th June 2015
More fallout from the toxic FIFA scandal (see here, here and here). Continue reading “In memoriam: FIFA’s stench kills free speech in Cayman”
From Eurodad: a wonderful sign that people are starting to gear up to challenge the many corporate tax abuses run out of secrecy jurisdictions like the European Dodgy Duchy of Luxembourg.
Continue reading “Luxembourg: the campaign on corporate tax has only just begun”
The OECD’s Chateau de la Muette
Sigh. Country-by-country reporting, an idea first mooted and pushed by Richard Murphy for TJN – is making slow but steady headway, in various fora internationally. The OECD, which only relatively rarely fails to disappoint, has been weighing in on this weighty affair. We now report on the latest news from this part of the front line.
From Alex Cobham’s blog, Uncounted: Continue reading “OECD country-by-country reporting: Strangled at birth”
The Economist gets radical
Recently, we wrote an article welcoming a major intervention by The Economist magazine, which was arguing that rules allowing people and corporations to set interest payments against their tax bills is a historical anachronism whose time has now gone.
Continue reading “TJN in The Economist: on the precious corporate income tax”
The Sydney News reports:
“The Australian government has produced draft legislation to classify the financial accounts of private wealthy families, in order to deter kidnappers.”
and there’s more, summed up by The Guardian: Continue reading “Australia may try to exempt wealthy via scaremongering”
Guest blog from Sigrid Klæboe Jacobsen of TJN Norway
On the 5th of June, a unanimous Norwegian Parliament voted for establishing a beneficial ownership registry. Continue reading “Norwegian Parliament votes for public registry of ownership”
Number-crunching, à la Private Eye: the case of HSBC and its Swiss fine for “organisational deficiencies” in relation to money-laundering.
Not all the assets under management were laundered, of course. Far from it, we must hope. But the “organisational deficiencies” – including reassuring clients that no information would reach their home authorities, or using offshore accounts to circumvent disclosure requirements – represent risks that applied to the whole operation.
To put it another way, the fine is about a fifth of the £135 million in tax that HMRC recovered in the UK alone.
Even the prosecutor imposing the fine was embarrassed, and “launched a stinging attack” on the Swiss law that apparently prevented anything within yodeling distance of being a deterrent.
Cross-posted from Uncounted
FIFA boss Sepp Blatter instructs the auditors
From Francine McKenna:
“Of all the individuals and firms tied up in the scandal over bribery and corruption at FIFA, scrutiny has so far largely escaped KPMG, the soccer association’s external auditor.”
That’s the summary, and our quote of the day. The article continues: Continue reading “Did KPMG spot anything amiss at FIFA?”
When we look back, might today be the day that momentum swung decisively against current international tax rules?
An independent commission made up of leading international economists, development thinkers and tax experts (see the graphic) has called for a radical overhaul of international corporate tax rules.
There are six main recommendations, set out below. Taken together, it’s possible that they will provide the basis for the kind of comprehensive reworking of tax rules that the G20 and G8 signally failed to deliver when they allowed the OECD mandate on BEPS (corporate tax Base Erosion and Profit-Shifting) to be watered down to a tweaking of the current system.
Continue reading “International commission calls for corporate tax reform”
May 2015. Welcome to the fifth Tax Justice Research Bulletin, a monthly series dedicated to tracking the latest developments in policy-relevant research on national and international taxation.
This issue looks at a fascinating thesis on the different people and organisations that influence the OECD revision of corporate tax rules; and a new analysis from the IMF on the scale of corporate profit-shifting, with particular attention to developing countries’ revenue losses. The Spotlight falls on the Financial Secrecy Index, which has just been published in Economic Geography. Continue reading “Tax Justice Research Bulletin 1(5)”
This headline may seem odd. Conventionally tax evasion involves cutting taxes by breaking laws; using tax incentives is a different creature altogether: it involves cutting taxes by using the law.
But this useful new report from the European parliament contains a twist on the conventional wisdom: Continue reading “Quote of the day – tax incentives as official tax evasion”
Cross-posted with the Uncounted blog, by TJN’s research director Alex Cobham.
World No Tobacco day was on Sunday (yesterday.)
World No Tobacco Day: Marching to Big Tobacco’s tune?
Has World No Tobacco Day 2015 – this Sunday – been manipulated by Big Tobacco’s lobbying agenda? Where the tobacco lobby is concerned, it would be naive to think there’s smoke without fire.
Continue reading “World No Tobacco Day: Marching to Big Tobacco’s tune?”
Brazilians have good reason to complain
We’ve just written about the role of Goldman Sachs in distorting U.S. sports and harming smaller players via tax cheating. Well, here is yet another thing to make you choke on your cornflakes: FIFA hurting poor countries though what we’d describe as aggressive, idiosyncratic tax cheating. Continue reading “The other FIFA scandal: poor countries and the tax-free bubble”