{"id":25011,"date":"2014-06-05T09:50:20","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T08:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=25011"},"modified":"2014-06-05T09:50:20","modified_gmt":"2014-06-05T08:50:20","slug":"tjns-response-to-jersey-is-if-youd-like-to-debate-were-happy-to-do-so-at-anytime-but-you-wont","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2014\/06\/05\/tjns-response-to-jersey-is-if-youd-like-to-debate-were-happy-to-do-so-at-anytime-but-you-wont\/","title":{"rendered":"TJN’s response to Jersey is “if you’d like to debate we’re happy to do so at anytime, but you won’t”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I mentioned a study that Jersey were promoting \u00a0on this blog more than a week ago<\/a>. It is being discussed in the City of London today. As was vert apparent from the blurb issued in support of that talk, this was Jersey's well funded response to the\u00a0Tax Justice Network, to whose position on Jersey I think it fair to say I have contributed much over the years. Now TJN has answered the criticisms in a new blog<\/a> and a detailed critique of the paper Jersey has funded <\/a>- which shows it is all just huff and puff. Think of the paper as being akin to Chris Giles' attack on Piketty in the FT: flawed logic, a gotcha mentality and a tortured philosophy of defence for the indefensible.<\/p>\n

This is the start of the TJN response:<\/p>\n

\n

Tax haven of Jersey attacks TJN with funded study<\/h3>\n

June 4, 2014<\/b><\/p>\n

Introduction<\/b><\/p>\n

Jersey Finance, the lead lobbying organisation for the British tax haven of Jersey, has sponsored two U.S. academics, Andrew Morriss and Richard Gordon, to produce and publicise a paper which attacks TJN and seeks to attack a report entitled\u00a0The Price of Offshore Revisited\u00a0which was prepared for TJN in 2012 by James S. Henry of the Sag Harbor Group in the U.S.\u00a0and which estimates that there is a roughly $21-32 trillion stock of wealth held offshore, worldwide. Jersey Finance is sponsoring an event in London on Thursday 5th\u00a0June 2014 to showcase the academics\u2019 \u201cindependent\u201d paper attacking TJN.<\/p>\n

We welcome any opportunity to debate these crucial issue, and the event in London would have provided us with a wonderful opportunity to showcase and present our estimates. Unfortunately, we have not been invited to provide a balance of views or even to reply to the criticisms and allegations in the paper. This article seeks to provide some balance.<\/p>\n

We have challenged Jersey Finance on repeated occasions (e.g.\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0here<\/a>) to public debates on these and on many other issues and they have rejected every one of our requests\u2014 even when we have organised debates in Jersey itself. Indeed, at a conference in Geneva in June 2012 Geoff Cook of Jersey Finance publicly stated that he was not willing to debate anything in public with John Christensen, director of the Tax Justice Network.<\/b><\/p>\n

We would welcome the opportunity to work together with Jersey Finance to research in greater depth the volumes of offshore wealth held on or through that island, and to shed further light on the steady drip, drip of Jersey-based financial and corruption scandals which continue to emerge \u2014 such as\u00a0here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and \u2014 just in the last week or so \u2014here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The academics\u2019 paper is an extraordinary, sprawling piece of work containing a long list of challenges to TJN\u2019s estimates, alleging that we are seeking to overplay the size of the problem.\u00a0Yet it fails to acknowledge crucial elements: including that (a) the methodologies employed by Jim Henry are widely used by specialist researchers, and (b) that several different methodologies were used to triangulate the results, for cross-checking purposes.<\/b><\/p>\n

The academics quite falsely seek to describe TJN as having a \u201ccontrol first\u201d mindset and frame their paper in the ideological language of anti-regulation, anti-tax libertarianism which is pervasive in the world of offshore tax havens.<\/b>\u00a0They do not acknowledge that the policy prescriptions that TJN promotes are predominantly transparency measures, e.g. automatic exchange of information, disclosure of ownership information, a country-by-country reporting standard, that build on the basic economic assumption that transparency is essential to the efficient operation of markets.\u00a0\u00a0 These policy measures have been endorsed by the G8 countries, the G20 countries, and by the OECD.<\/p>\n

The academics recruited to Jersey\u2019s cause criticise TJN for poor process.\u00a0 They claim they have tried to contact TJN and Jim Henry, via a research assistant, to discuss the report.\u00a0 Mr Henry has received literally hundreds of requests for interviews and advice from journalists and researchers since the\u00a0Price of Offshore Revisited\u00a0was published in July 2012.\u00a0 He is not aware of any enquiry from a research assistant at the University of Alabama.\u00a0 TJN\u2019s contact details \u2014 including the personal mobile number of our director, John Christensen \u2014 are published online,\u00a0here<\/a>. He is confident that he personally has not received these enquiries, and he has been assiduous in responding to every enquiry on this matter that has come his way.<\/p>\n

A specific criticism related to the fact that all the underlying data sets for the\u00a0Price of Offshore Revisited\u00a0has not been made available online \u2014 which is the case.\u00a0 In 2012 Henry advised TJN that he was planning to use the datasets and his analysis, the copyright of which belongs to Sag Harbor Group, as the basis for an academic book, with all the relevant associated datasets published online. This has not yet happened, but Henry advises us (June 2014) that he is close to finalizing a book contract with a major academic publisher.\u00a0 We would, however, note that he has presented his data and findings to scrutiny at several universities, including Columbia, Essex, McGill, Princeton and others, and has discussed his estimates with many academic researchers and journalists.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

The academics never gave TJN or Mr. Henry their paper, or a draft or sections of their paper, to discuss.<\/b>\u00a0As far as we are aware, they did not attend methodological workshops held to discuss the methods. Given that Jersey Finance has admitted to having \u201cdecided to support\u201d the academics\u2019 work, and given that (as we have extensively documented) well-funded tax havens such as Jersey constantly need put on strenuous \u2018theatres of probity\u2019 involving denial of their tax haven status (see more\u00a0here<\/a>) \u2014 one has to question whether this Alabama paper, which Jersey Finance describes as a \u201cpretty rigorous academic exercise, funded in part by Jersey Finance\u201d involves properly independent academic research.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As TJN says:<\/p>\n

We stand firmly by our 2012 estimates, which we always felt were conservative. We are close to finalising additional material and sources backing those earlier estimates, in a separate document which will be available to journalists and researchers on request, hopefully today (June 4th) or tomorrow morning. We will post these documents permanently on the\u00a0reports section<\/a>\u00a0of our website.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They're right to stick to their guns. This appears a shoddy piece of work by Jersey, and those they have funded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I mentioned a study that Jersey were promoting \u00a0on this blog more than a week ago. It is being discussed in the City of London
 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":[7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jersey","category-tax-justice-network"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25011","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=25011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}