{"id":13391,"date":"2012-01-01T10:13:03","date_gmt":"2012-01-01T10:13:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=13391"},"modified":"2012-01-01T10:13:03","modified_gmt":"2012-01-01T10:13:03","slug":"if-you-dont-believe-tax-justice-network-has-changed-the-isle-of-man-then-read-what-they-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2012\/01\/01\/if-you-dont-believe-tax-justice-network-has-changed-the-isle-of-man-then-read-what-they-say\/","title":{"rendered":"If you don’t believe Tax Justice Network has changed the Isle of Man then read what they say"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Isle of Man News has a fascinating\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0asking whether the pressure has been taken off the\u00a0Isle of Man now on tax matters.<\/p>\n

Much of the analysis is wrong\u00a0because\u00a0they think the issues are\u00a0now\u00a0resolved, and that is far from true but just for the\u00a0moment\u00a0I want to highlight another issue, which is the credit implicitly given to the\u00a0Tax Justice Network for forcing change. As they say:<\/p>\n

Over the past five years, our financial services, tax rates and Customs deal have come under intense scrutiny from beyond our shores.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve had the EU question our corporate tax regime, the painful revision of our VAT deal twice in two years, an inquiry commissioned by the Westminster government has run the rule over our ability to withstand financial shocks and the OECD has reviewed our tax transparency and co-operation.<\/p>\n

It seems that barely a week went by without another brickbat being lobbed our way by Brussels, London or Washington.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And quite right too. All of then were justified. As they then out it though, discussing the\u00a0introduction\u00a0of incredibly limited\u00a0automatic information exchange under the\u00a0European Union Savings Tax Directive:<\/p>\n

It is notable that even the Tax Justice Network, consistent critics of so-called \u2018secrecy jurisdictions\u2019 has acknowledged the work the island has done in this area.<\/p>\n

On VAT, the loss of more than \u00a3175 million in revenue \u2014 about one third of total government income \u2014 has caused major problems in balancing the budget. But even here, the UK has indicated it won\u2019t be back for more.<\/p>\n

And on zero\/10, now finally resolved with the announcement last week by Brussels, criticisms from Europe were dealt with by decisive action: by scrapping ARI, the anti-avoidance measure, that the EU Code Group considered as harmful. The result was to save the corporate tax strategy and the thousands of jobs that depend on it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let's look at those three issues: TJN has been at the forefront of the work on pushing for automatic information exchange; it was my work in\u00a0\u00a02007<\/a> that began the whole saga that led to the abolition of the Isle of Man's VAT subsidy and it was my work on zero\/ten from 2005<\/a> onwards that highlighted all the changes that had to be made to that system before it was remotely compliant with EU law.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
In the circumstances \u00a0the\u00a0following\u00a0is interesting to note:<\/div>\n
\n

Tax justice campaigners argue that offshore centres help to plunder resources and siphon wealth from Third World Countries.<\/p>\n

Mr Bell denies the Isle of Man plays any such role. He confirmed that the island is considering extending Tax Information Exchange Agreements to developing nations, a move advocated by the OECD\u2019s Global Forum \u2014 so long, he said, as an appropriate model is in place to do so, given that many such countries did not have a properly developed tax system and there were issues of corruption in some regimes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We've been right on everything else. We're right on this too. And that's why none of the pressure on tax havens will be going away in 2012. Because that was the issue that always motivated me and the\u00a0Tax Justice Network.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Isle of Man News has a fascinating\u00a0article\u00a0asking whether the pressure has been taken off the\u00a0Isle of Man now on tax matters. Much of the
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-isle-of-man","category-tax-justice-network"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}