I was sent a document produced by Ernst & Young late last week. No, not the one that revealed their paranoia about country-by-country reporting and accountability; another one. Try as I might I have not been able to find this one on their own web site. The download source I have is from the UK
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Ernst & Young issued a report yesterday called ‘Tax Transparency: Seizing the initiative‘. Put bluntly, the report says that there shouldn’t be a legal requirement to deliver country-by-country reporting, the accounts reporting system I created a decade ago and which would require that all multinational corporations publish a separate profit and loss account (or income statement) for each and every country in which
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Having been out of action fo9r a few days, let me return with an issue that seems worthy of comment even if from another day’s headlines. It combines three rich themes: Davos, tax avoidance and the Big 4 accountants. As the Telegraph reported a day or two ago: Responding to calls for companies to “pay their fair
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I was on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 twice this morning. You can listen again here, and here.

The FT reports: The UK arm of Ernst & Young and one of its former partners have been accused of misconduct in relation to their auditing of Farepak, the Christmas hamper savings club that collapsed six years ago. The Financial Reporting Council, the accounting and corporate governance regulator, said on Thursday it had filed a
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A representative from Ernst & Young came to the meeting I spoke at in the European Parliament last night on country-by-country reporting. He was a very confused chap. I concentrated on EU related issues: Eurodad, as a development agency, unsurprisingly concentrated on developing country issues. And then up popped E & Y (and I paraphrase, but
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As the FT notes this morning: Allegations of police bribery at the News of the World have raised fresh questions about the role of auditors and their responsibility for preventing corporate wrongdoing. But as preparations are made for a judge-led inquiry into the disgraced tabloid, the firm that vetted its accounts seems unlikely to face investigation
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It looks like the Business model of a major News International subsidiary in the UK was corrupt. Where were the auditors, Ernst & Young? What did they have to say? Or was it all ‘immaterial’? It doesn’t look that way now. And an auditor does have a duty to review the legal environment in which
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As the FT notes: Ambitious plans for a pan-European corporate tax system that gained new momentum at a summit of European leaders on Friday could push up compliance costs for multinationals, according to a report by Irish business groups. This is a plan for what is called the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base. What this
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