In the Guardian yesterday Eliza Anyangwe said that Africa loses more than three times the amount it gets in aid “mainly by multinational companies deliberately misreporting the value of their imports or exports to reduce tax”. This statement is not true, but it is a reasonable summary of what a report called ‘Honest Accounts‘, which was published last […]

Yesterday the Guardian reported that Labour plans clampdown on ‘sweetheart deals’ to close £36bn tax gap “Shadow chancellor John McDonnell said if Labour wins the next general election it would “close the loopholes through which large corporations swindle the public”. He said the “tax gap” between what companies should be paying and what is actually received […]

This article appeared in Tax Analysts  (Pdf to download) Starting this year, large multinational companies will file their first country-by-country (CbC) reports with information on sales, profits, number of employees, and taxes paid for their entities in each jurisdiction where they operate. Businesses are also increasingly recognizing that tax is a reputational issue and are publishing […]

(This article is republished with permission from Tax Journal – download it as a pdf) Starting this year large companies operating in the UK are required to publish an annual statement explaining their tax strategy. The new rules apply to UK companies, partnerships and groups with a turnover above £200m or a balance sheet over £2bn. It will […]

Last week I was at a conference held by Tax Justice Norway, Chr Michelson Institute (CMI) and the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) in Bergen. The conference was called “Lifting the Veil of Secrecy: Tax Havens, Capital Flows and Developing Countries”. It included academics, legal practitioners and campaigners, and covered a wide ground ranging from […]

Congratulations to James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam (and 17 others) who won their employment tribunal case against Uber last week. The case concerned whether Uber drivers in the UK are self-employed independent contractors or ‘workers’ for Uber. The tribunal ruled that drivers work for Uber, not the other way round and therefore they are entitled to […]

This article appeared in Tax Journal on 13 October 2016 and is reproduced with permission. (Available as a pdf) The art of estimating the scale of tax avoidance involves tentative extrapolations, careful assumptions and caveats. The data available is patchy, calculations are educated guestimates, and studies must first deal with the problem that the term ‘avoidance’ itself means different things to different people.

I was excited to hear last year that ICAI (the UK’s Independent Commission for Aid Impact) was embarking on a Learning Review of DFID’s programme of work on international tax avoidance and evasion. It is a small programme (according to the report around £3 million a year, and three advisors who participate in international committees) […]

A couple of weeks ago UNCTAD published a study on illicit financial flows through trade misinvoicing which they said “revealed staggering revenue losses to developing countries”. It made the extraordinary claim that “virtually all gold exported by South Africa leaves the country unreported” and suggested this was explained by  massive smuggling. The South African authorities took […]

[Updated on August 2nd and 3rd, and 16th  and December 27th and August 21 2017 – updates at the bottom] This is a running update post following my post of July 20th 2016: Misinvoicing or Misunderstanding? . I will keep updating it. The story so far On July 16 2016 UNCTAD published a study on Trade Misinvoicing […]