AccountingWEB has reported this morning that:
Lee Douglass, a former audit manager at PwC, has been excluded from the ICAEW over dishonestly claiming expenses from his employer.
Douglass brought discredit on himself and the profession between 1 July 2007 and 16 September 2008 when he dishonestly claimed 15 expenses totalling £3,858.94.
Along with failing to participate in the legal proceedings and numerous hearing dates, Douglass also failed to provide a registered address in spite of being asked by ICAEW to do so.
Now don't get me wrong; I don't condone anyone fiddling expenses.
But let's also be clear, chartered accountants have worked in tax havens for decades and as all those places are now beginning to admit, their economies were once based on tax evasion. That may not be true now, although I've yet to see evidence that changes my mind, but how many chartered accountants have faced disciplinary hearing for being engaged in tax haven activity? I suspect the answer is zero and yet these places, as Robert Morgenthau said the other day in the New York Times:
How much havoc can these offshore schemes wreak? Where there is no transparency, there can be no oversight. Abuses grow literally without limit. Huge bankruptcies like Enron and Parmalat have resulted when corporations faked their balance sheets using offshore secrecy jurisdictions.
Nothing in offshore havens happens on a small scale. Almost any statistic flunks the red-face test. Consider the British Virgin Islands, home to about 30,000 people and 457,000 companies.
Offshore secrecy jurisdictions provide the perfect cover to funnel money and arms to rogue states and nonstate actors.
And who, by their presence, lend more credibility to these places than anyone else? That's the Big 4 firms of accountants, of course. They're between them in them all. But is there any sanction for that, or the threat to democracy that they pose as a result? No, none at all.
Instead the ICAEW campaign against the transparency that would expose this abuse.
The dual standards at Moorgate Place beggar belief, but it was ever thus. They're great at regulating the small stuff whilst turning a deliberate blind eye to the threat to society, markets and democracy itself that some of their members pose. That's regulatory capture for you.
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You continually refuse to resign from ICAEW on the grounds that it’s better to call for change inside.
Even you must know see this isn’t going to work. So you draw a line somewhere, say it’s not possible, I tender my resignation.
Or is the prestige and ego of being a FCA just too great?
Far from it
I’m simply much more effective as an FCA than without it
And I suspect I always will be
It is regulatory capture, undoubtedly, but it’s also typical of the nature of individual humans and institutions too. Admitting the nature and size of the problem would require doing something about it, which would be difficult and challenging and require substantial effort, as well as opening them up to uncomfortable self-examination. Easier for them to simply ignore the fact that it exists, and thus able to ignore the consequences.
We need an AA for the tax profession…
Yes indeed. Now connected to this, yesterday, Tuesday I linked to Nicholas Shaxson’s item on Lazy Faire re the B of E’s handling of financial stability in the last decade or so. This was developed into what I call “Coal Train Syndrome”. I think you will understand it.
So now you want to prosecute people for simply working in a tax haven?! Orwell’s 1984 anyone?
Im sorry but didn’t you qualify and work for a big 4? so in other words chunks of your salary were probably paid with proceeds that had been derived from tax haven/avoidance activity?
“how many chartered accountants have faced disciplinary hearing for being engaged in tax haven activity?”
On your reckoning shouldn’t that include deriving a benefit (whether it be financial gain or the benefit of employment) from tax haven activity.
This looks a bit like dual standards of dual standards. Quadruple standards maybe.
If that’s the best you can come up with, heaven help accountancy
At last…someone prepared to say it how it is…
Trouble is, theft/fraud (obtaining money by deception) is a criminal offence. If I were an accountant I’m not sure I would oppose the expulsion of fellow members who have been convicted of fraud.
Working in a tax haven (however that is defined) is not a criminal offence. You repeatedly claim the UK is a tax haven. So presumably you think everyone in gainful employment in the UK is worse than someone who fiddles expenses?
I didn’t defend the person expelled
And you clearly misrepresent what I said
I made clear there are people who have deliberately supported tax haven activity – they are who need to be questioned for it, and aren’t
Sadly, under the reporting rules, it will be the middle managers who know next to nothing about what their middlingly managing that will get the worst of it.
Without having to bang on, the deals are made by the grey-criminality of the “now watch this drive” golfing-sociopaths that secrecy jurisdictions rely on.
Guernsey’s IFC has been, maybe unwittingly, very forward in letting in some light in to some of the more obvious holes. There is a role for a lot of the services Guernsey offers. The cleaner ‘tax havens’ can get, the better globalisation can realise its ideological goals.
Globalisation’s ideals may not be in the interests of all
Richard,
You couldn’t have been clearer – the misrepresentation was obviously deliberate. You are clearly striking a sensitive spot …
I assure you – I am
But I can’t say why yet
[…] No doubt Deloitte will suffer no professional consequence despite its alleged wilful failure. Such is the way things are. […]
It happens big time in Audit. The Institute of Chartered Accountants has taken a mighty hammer to small practitioners but doffed its cap to the Big 4. By and large, with a few notable exceptions, it is the Big 4 Institute. That’s why Tax Havens are tolerated.