The Observer editorial says today:
No politician in Britain, the rest of Europe or the US has an answer to one basic question: how will the financial services be overhauled so they are, in future, the servant, not the master, of the global economy?
That is true. There is good reason. Not one of them has yet [...]
The Guardian has settled its libel action with Tescos.
Sure, The Guardian has apologised. As was clear within days of the story emerging, it was wrong to claim that 100% of the profits arising from Tesco’s sale and lease back deals arose offshore. They didn’t.
But as I showed, having interviewed their tax director, they did involve [...]
George Osborne wrote a letter to Alistair Darling on Friday as a consequence of the reported news that Regus, Charter and Henderson are all leaving the UK for a combination of Jersey and Ireland. This is what he wrote:
Dear Alistair,
I’m sure you are as concerned as I am about the news that Regus, Henderson Group [...]
Polly Toynbee has an article with the above title in today’s Guardian.
She rebuts the claim that George Osborne made last week that it is the Tories who will take forward the fairness agenda:
[I]f “aspirations” for fairness are not backed by hard cash then no amount of good intentions will prevent the disaster that saw child [...]
This comes from Dell’s quarterly filing to May 2 2008:
Income Taxes
We reported an effective income tax rate of approximately 23.5% for the first quarter of Fiscal 2009, as compared to 25.3% for the same quarter in the prior year. The decrease in our effective rate for the first quarter of Fiscal 2009 is primarily due [...]
I note that the Right have already been reading the Guardian’s accounts, published today, and are spreading misinformation about its effective tax rate, no doubt because of the Tescos case.
To set the matter straight, this is their profit and loss account:
And this is the relevant note to the accounts:
Now let’s be clear: what this shows [...]
The following motion has been proposed for discussion at the TUC conference in September:
P26 Tax justiceCongress welcomes the publication of the TUC pamphlet The Missing Billions, which reveals that many companies and wealthy individuals are manipulating the tax system to avoid paying £25bn in tax each year.
Congress believes this undermines the development of a more [...]
I was intrigued by a comment that I noticed had been posted on AccountingWeb. In response to comments that I had posted Steve Pipe, who advises accountancy firms on how to maximise profits, said:
the only thing we really differ on is the judgement call as to what constitutes “acceptable tax planning”.
You clearly take a very [...]
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 [...]
The Economist had an article on companies leaving the UK last week. They concluded by giving space to Mike Devereux Oxford University:
The government’s proposals go far beyond what is reasonable to protect Britain’s tax base, says Michael Devereux, a professor at the Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation. The government is now looking for a [...]
