This week the International Centre for Taxation and Development published an important book on unitary taxation. Unitary taxation is an alternative model of taxation that seeks to treat multinational enterprises as single companies.

That may not sound like a revolutionary concept. After all, for most people, large multinational brands, such as Starbucks, Kraft, Vodafone or Macdonald's, are just that, single companies.

But that is not how tax authorities and governments view these companies. Instead for years, tax authorities have viewed each individual local subsidiary of a multinational company as an individual, profit maximising entity. This kind of approach has opened the way to the many of the tax avoidance scandals we have seen over the last few years.

The unitary approach is a way of changing the system to make sure companies are taxed fairly in the countries in which they operate.

The book can be downloaded, free, here.

I should make the declaration that the book includes a chapter by Prof Prem Sikka and me.

PDF of article