Earlier this year Mike Truman, the editor of Taxation magazine, wrote a bad-tempered and ill-judged article in which he claimed Margaret Hodge MP was the ‘tax prat of the year‘. Mike proved himself the rightful recipient of the aware he had created in the process of doing so. But he did something more significant than that.
Read the Rest…

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has published a vast array of articles on offshore today, based on hundreds of thousands of leaked documents. The Guardian and BBC are the main UK partners in the international work. In many ways what the work reveals is what we already knew. I’m not criticising it for that: having evidence
Read the Rest…

The OECD is acknowledging that aggressive tax planning (ATP) is more extensive and damaging than they have previously admitted. Take this by the OECD, issued yesterday, acknowledging that artificial hedging deals are now used – something I anticipated in my last country-by-country report as I know it is now commonplace in the extractive industries: Aggressive tax planning (ATP) schemes based on after-tax hedging pose
Read the Rest…

Prem Sikka has an excellent article in the Guardian in which he argues: The long-awaited report by the Competition Commission on the UK auditing market is a disappointment. The market is dominated by just four accounting firms – PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Deloitte and Ernst & Young – who collectively audit more than 95% of the FTSE 350 companies. Why? This is
Read the Rest…

Cameron is keeping up the rhetoric on tax avoidance, as reported in the Giardian this morning: On tax the prime minister said the time had come to challenge the distinction between tax evasion, which is illegal, and tax avoidance, which is legal. Cameron said businesses have no excuse to avoid paying their fair share of
Read the Rest…

I gave evidence before the House of Lords last week on the Finance Bill 2013 and the General Anti-Abuse Rule in particular. A transcript is here. Let’s leave that particular issue aside for a moment and note instead that Bill Dodwell of Deloitte and the Chartered Institute of Tax made the claim: There is one of the challenges: companies do not pay tax This is one
Read the Rest…

David Cameron’s comments about accountants yesterday in his speech on tax avoidance has created a hostile reaction from the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. Accountancy Live has reported: The UK accountancy profession has been left reeling by Prime Minister David Cameron’s outspoken attack on the industry. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the
Read the Rest…

Economia magazine is the official publication of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales. I’ve just realised that it published its summary of the top 50 blogs used by chartered accountants just before Christmas. And as they put it: The list is dominated by journalists, with Newsnight’s economics editor Paul Mason coming in at number seven. Flying the
Read the Rest…

I was on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 twice this morning. You can listen again here, and here.