This week a new study came out on Trade Misinvoicing in Primary Commodities in Developing Countries by Professor Léonce Ndikumana of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, published by UNCTAD. It looks at the value of commodities such as copper, oil, gold, cocoa etc…exported from Chile, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia and compares […]

Interviewees for jobs at Google are famously are asked fiendish questions like “how much does the Empire State Building weigh?” or “how many piano tuners are there in Chicago?”.[1]  The point of these ‘Fermi questions’ is not that there is a right answer, but that quick thinking applicants can combine the knowable (the population of Chicago), […]

Controversies about corporate ‘tax dodging’ tend to follow a common pattern. Critics expose the web of complex structures and opaque transactions used by a company and point to the advantageous tax result. It might be legal, they say, but it smells fishy.But one person’s egregious exploitation of loopholes, can be another’s innocuous interpretation of the […]

I am delighted to welcome a guest post by Iain Campbell who is a member of the National Committee of the UK Association of Revenue and Customs (ARC). While I have  previously looked at the ‘big numbers’ that shape the debate on corporate tax avoidance, here Iain takes a close look at an estimate relating to offshore […]

The headline cases from the Panama Papers illustrate the problem of criminals, sanctions breakers, corrupt officials, tax evaders and fraudsters hiding their assets behind innocent sounding corporations and trusts. With a cache of 1.5 million documents, there are likely to be secrets that are still to be revealed, but already issues of corruption, fraud and theft […]

A lot of focus in the UK has been on the question of whether Google is doing something artificial and abusive by “booking” revenues from UK-based advertisers in Ireland, rather than in the UK (the so called ‘permanent establishment’ question). This seems to me to be a red herring. Many people have become convinced that […]

The settlement between HMRC and Google that the company will pay  £130 million in additional back taxes and higher rates of tax in the future is big news here in the UK, and is an early sign of how implementation of the  G20/OECD ‘BEPs’ international tax reforms might play out.   A common reaction to the announcement that, after a […]

A joint blog post with Vijaya Ramachandran – cross-posted at the Center for Global DevelopmentIts that time of year again when presidents, CEOs and civil society leaders get together at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, leaving the rest of us to wonder whether it is really true that a small number of very rich people at […]

I did not start this blog with the intention of endlessly cataloguing strange-numbers-and-weird-beliefs in the international tax avoidance debates, but since I have taken on the role of the child-who-missed-the-memo-about-the-Emperor’s-New Clothes, I guess I have to keep pointing them out when they stride past. Last week the king who was in the altogether was Transparency […]

Tax abuse scandals have played a big role in the Zambian national debate on how best to tax mining, and Zambia, as a case study, has played a big role in international debates on tax abuse and development. In particular many believe that Zambia is a prime illustration of where multinational mining corporations are selling commodities at […]