The Guardian has reported this morning that:
Tax avoiders' accountants face being forced to give evidence before MPs after a Commons committee announced a series of inquiries in the wake of the Panama and Paradise Papers investigations.
A subcommittee of the Treasury select committee will investigate tax avoidance and evasion, as well as whether HMRC offers “sweetheart deals” to multinationals, while the main committee holds an inquiry into VAT policy.
A series of hearings on tax abuse, examining the practices of major accountancy firms, individual tax avoiders and evaders and the use of the UK's crown dependencies and overseas territories, will be heard over the next six months.
I know a bit about how such committees work, having worked with several. Good preparation is key.
I hope this committee gets the support it needs.
We need it to do a good job.
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Won’t Treasury supply adequate support and advice?
Presumably there will be plenty of independent expertise there.
I don’t know how Treasury works – I am a local government man, and we generally have adequate in-house support for committees.
I’d be surprised if Treasury committees operated differently, but I am open to being told otherwise.
The Treasury has no relationship with the Tresury Committee
It certainly does not advise them
And a good job too: most of the time they are investigating the Treasury or its capture by those who promote tax avoidance and other economic abuses
Thanks.
So who advises/supports them? Do they have their own infrastructure or do they have to purchase it from outside?
And if the latter, what if they are investigating that provider or something that would put that provider in an awkward position? All sounds messy.
Absurdly, they have to beg for it
They beg for it from the big 4 then grandstand to accuse the big 4 of revolving doors and corporate capture. There must be a better alternative
The most telling comment in the Guardian report is the last paragraph I think:
“The Foreign Office minister Alan Duncan said the government would only pressure the territories to adopt new transparency measures when they became a global standard, and he said an EU commitment to introduce public registers did not meet that threshold”
That lays bare the government position fairly clearly I would have thought. Rather exposes the rest of the government action as a window dressing exercise, unless John Mann can raise more clout than Alan Duncan.
Itbuscas uf U.K. policy is ‘when North Korea does this we will too’.
This should be a shoo-in for Richard assuming he has the time and the fee is as befits a man of his calibre.
Fee?
There is no fee…..