{"id":21111,"date":"2013-06-07T19:43:39","date_gmt":"2013-06-07T18:43:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=21111"},"modified":"2013-06-07T19:43:39","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T18:43:39","slug":"this-is-not-country-by-country-reporting-vodafone-please-note","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2013\/06\/07\/this-is-not-country-by-country-reporting-vodafone-please-note\/","title":{"rendered":"This is not country-by-country reporting &#8211; Vodafone, please note"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Vodafone <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vodafone.com\/content\/sustainability\/operating_responsibly\/tax\/our_contribution_country_by_country.html\" target=\"_blank\">published this report today<\/a> - as if to apologise for the fact that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/business\/2013\/jun\/07\/vodafone-no-uk-corporation-tax-mobile-phone\" target=\"_blank\">they did not pay any\u00a0corporation\u00a0tax in the UK<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Screen-shot-2013-06-07-at-19.33.01.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-21112\" alt=\"Screen shot 2013-06-07 at 19.33.01\" src=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Screen-shot-2013-06-07-at-19.33.01.png\" width=\"561\" height=\"1099\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Screen-shot-2013-06-07-at-19.33.01.png 561w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Screen-shot-2013-06-07-at-19.33.01-153x300.png 153w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Screen-shot-2013-06-07-at-19.33.01-522x1024.png 522w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Screen-shot-2013-06-07-at-19.33.01-67x132.png 67w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 561px) 100vw, 561px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>So let me say quite emphatically this is not\u00a0country-by-country reporting, whatever Vodafone say.<\/p>\n<p>First of all the tax figures are utter nonsense and comprise:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Vodafone\u2019s total direct tax contribution in each country, including corporation tax, business rates or equivalent, employers\u2019 national insurance contributions or equivalent, municipal and city taxes, sector-specific taxes (such as \u2018special\u2019 taxes, \u2018telecoms\u2019 taxes or \u2018crisis\u2019 taxes), stamp duty land tax, stamp duty reserve tax, irrecoverable Value Added Tax (VAT), insurance premium tax, climate change levy, environmental taxes, customs duties, fuel excise duties, vehicle excise duty and acquisition taxes. An illustrative list of the types of taxes paid is set out in the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.vodafone.com\/content\/sustainability\/operating_responsibly\/tax\/our_contribution_country_by_country.html#occbc3\">Appendix<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Business rates are a cost: a service is provided in exchange. All economists\u00a0would\u00a0agree\u00a0employees\u00a0really bear the cost of employer's national\u00a0insurance\u00a0- so it's absurd to say the company does. And I could go on, but this is just Mickey Mouse accounting trying to come up with the biggest number the company can come up with to call tax as an excuse for not paying tax on its income -\u00a0which\u00a0is what we expect.<\/p>\n<p>Second, this is not accounting data. We don't know sales by country, profit by country, employment cost by country, purchases by country and so on. That\u00a0means\u00a0we have nothing to\u00a0compare\u00a0these absurd numbers with to see if\u00a0they're\u00a0reasonable. But all accounting data only\u00a0gains\u00a0its credibility by\u00a0comparison\u00a0 here there is no\u00a0comparison\u00a0so this is not\u00a0accounting\u00a0information. At best you could call it disclosure; at worst lets just call it naive bragging whose only purpose is to prove that Vodafone could do proper\u00a0country-by-country reporting but chose not to do so and give us misinformation instead.<\/p>\n<p>We have a long way to go on this issue as yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vodafone published this report today &#8211; as if to apologise for the fact that they did not pay any\u00a0corporation\u00a0tax in the UK: &nbsp; So let<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2013\/06\/07\/this-is-not-country-by-country-reporting-vodafone-please-note\/\"><em> Read the full article&#8230;<\/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":[79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-country-by-country"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21111","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=21111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}