The committee set up by Alastair Darling to consider the future of corporation tax, and in particular the taxation of foreign profits, meets for the first time on Monday 9 June even though the consultation paper that gave rise to the furore that caused its establishment has now been withdrawn.
I admit that this means that [...]
I admit that there are moments when I quietly despair of the harm that is likely to result from so called tax reforms. This morning the FT has reported that:
Corporation tax should be scrapped and replaced by extra value added tax
adding that:
The proposal, which is designed to address the growing difficulties faced by the Treasury [...]
Accountancy Age has a good article called ‘Guarding reputations: tax profession needs to clean up its act’. By seasoned journalist Sarah Perrin, it seeks to explore an issue.
I won’t comment on much of what it says: there’s enough of me in the original. What I am interested in is the comment by Bill Dodwell, head [...]
The US is getting tougher on tax exiles. As the Wall Street Journal reports:
Hundreds of Americans formally renounce their U. S. citizenship every year, many in order to protect their wealth from income, estate and gift taxes.
They do, of course, leave the US, usually for a tax haven, at the same time.
But now Congress has [...]
I am almost amused by a comment made this morning concerning my analysis of Tesco’s financing operation in Zug in Switzerland by Tim Worstall who had this to say:
Richard Murphy of course doesn’t agree but then so what? He’s in fact completely missed which Treasury is losing from the arrangement, and it ain’t the UK [...]
Tesco’s claim that it doesn’t avoid tax has been blown clean out of the water by Private Eye. In this week’s edition the Eye notes that, as it puts it, Tesco has been avoiding corporation tax through a complex web of offshore operations. That is, of course, exactly the allegation the Guardian also made a [...]
AccountingWeb has an article in which it is claimed that 95% of accountants may be negligent with regard to tax planning because they do not tell all their clients of all the tax planning schemes that might be available to them.
I think that an absurd suggestion and have said so on that site, saying:
This debate [...]
I note BAT now has a new reason for not paying UK tax. Previously it was that it’s UK head office made a loss. That’s been their story for the last year or so, until a week or two back.
Now I note that they told the Sunday Express that it’s because all it’s tax is [...]
The Times has reported this morning that:
Some of Britain’s biggest listed companies, including several that have threatened to redomicile abroad, paid little or no corporation tax in Britain in 2007.
Research by The Times shows that FTSE-100 companies - Cadbury, Standard Chartered and British American Tobacco, which have a combined market capitalisation of £75 billion, employed [...]
One of those from the Right who is apt to comment on this blog has noted that earlier today I said in my blog on Tescos that
Tax planning and tax avoidance are both normal and legal
My response is to quote President Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, who said:
if taxes are the price of civilized society, [...]
