I was on The World at One this lunchtime on BBC Radio 4. If you are in the UK you should be able to listen here, starting at about 38 minutes in.
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Hi Richard,
I listened to your interview on W@1 on R4,
I’m curious to know the background/context of the other chap who was chosen to counter your point of view, I didn’t clearly hear his name but I understood him to be a employee or member of CIOT
It seems the onus of contextualisation is always placed on the listener or viewer these days to research for themselves who the person expressing an opinion is actually representing,
He did seem a little disgruntled by your proposals!
It was John Cullinane, technical director of the CIOT, formerly senior tax partner at Deloitte and former CIOT president
You presented a coherent, articulate and impressive case for change. John Cullinane did not. Apart from the message that it was all too difficlut, and we can’t change it, he was incoherent, and inarticulate, and deeply unimpressive.
I couldn’t possibly comment…..
Richard
Nice to see at last you getting some decent airtime. Where is that other bastion of tax morality The Taxpayers Alliance? They don’t seem to have much to say on the big tax issues of the day. No doubt having a St. Paul’s conversion soon to join the one true church.
I’m not sure anyone is much in the mood for apologists these days
Richard
Heard your very cogent argument for what seemed essentially to be agreeing a global profit pie for a group before carving it up according to some agreed set of criteria. Led me to find this site which struck many chords.
I completely agree with such an approach being needed and advocated such a view privately for some time. Having been CFO of several medium sized (100s of million revenues not billions)international UK headquartered IT and services groups, I got annoyed at the lack of a level playing field between how we operated on a vanilla basis and many large US owned groups.
Sadly not a popular view amongst many CFO and advisory colleagues.
As an aside, I would also stop all tax deductibility for interest, on the grounds that:
-debt is too easy to move around internationally
-it biases the economy to more opaque high debt PE ownership and away from more open listed companies
-it subsidises a form of funding which creates more inherent instability (as articulated in Adair Turner’s recent ‘Between Debt and the Devil’ book). If I was to suggest brining back MIRAS, everyone would think me mad, but oddly the world seems OK with debt subsidies for companies
Ian
We are on a wavelength
Thanks for your comment
Richard