Accountancy Age has reported that:
Multi-national companies would be prepared to open their books, on an anonymised basis, to convince the Treasury to introduce a tax exemption for inbound dividends.
The issue of the exemption is at the heart of a debate on taxing multi-nationals foreign subsidiaries. The Treasury wants to drop the taxes on inbound dividends to help simplify company structures, but is worried there will be large scale tax avoidance as a result.
A poll by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that 80% of companies would be open to providing information on their affairs as part of an impact assessment.
90% of them were in favour of the dividend exemption, PwC added.
Oh, no, I say. Let's get real here. There are two important messages in this:
1) HM Revenue & Customs do not know the structure of the MNCs they tax
2) Those multinationals have no intention of telling them.
So why, oh why, aren't HM Revenue & Customs coming out strongly in support of country-by-country reporting which would give them most of what they want? It's in their power to do so. Readers at 100 Parliament Street please note.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
