2007 was a good year for tax justice. Most important of all was a serous change in the development community. There is now significant support for the idea that the creation of effective tax systems is vital is developing countries are to end their dependency upon aid. There’s also been widespread agreement that this requires
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It’s a fact that we cannot do without taxes. That’s because we cannot do without government. And we cannot do without markets either, at least in the world as we know it. The relationship is symbiotic: governments provide the structure in which markets can work: markets need government as their insurer of last resort: populations
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One of my Jersey correspondents tells me that the public’s repulsion for the regressive GST (Goods and Services Tax) to be introduced in Jersey in 2008 has even got to the local pantomime at the Opera House, Jersey. A question was asked to the audience “What does GST stand for?” The retort was “Get Stuffed
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The Guardian has reported that: Totesport Casino, an internet arm of government-owned bookmaker the Tote, is switching its operations to the offshore tax haven of Alderney in a controversial move that will allow it to advertise freely in the UK while avoiding UK tax and regulation. Remember the Mapeley debacle where the Revenue sold 600
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Max Hastings, a former editor of the Daily Telegraph wrote a thoughtful piece on corruption for the Guardian earlier this week. I recommend it. I applaud anyone who will say: When the powerful can live beyond the law, corruption is never far away and [In Britain] we seem rashly acquiescent about the expatriate community in
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Jerome Turquey has an astonishing entry on his blog. As he notes, page 20 of the FATF Annual Report for 2006 – 07 says: Thanks to a generous gift by Luxembourg the FATF is improving its IT systems to offer to its delegates a better access to confidential documents. This system will be reinforced in
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Tax compliance is paying the right tax at the right time in the right place in accordance with the spirit of the law in the states in which a person operates and where ‘right’ means that the economic substance of a transaction and the form in which it is reported for tax coincide.

Two people claiming to be Channel Island’s financial services operators have been making extensive comments on two blogs on this site. Despite the claims of those who suggest I censor this site worse, I have undertaken considerable correspondence with these two precisely because it has been so revealing. The first correspondent appears to be with
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Accountancy Age reports that: Business leaders in the world’s biggest economy will be discussing US Treasury’s latest tax reform proposal, including the lowering of corporate income tax to 28% and introduction of a so-called business activity tax, which would act as a VAT. Yet again, the corporate world seeks to lower its tax bill by
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