{"id":39792,"date":"2017-12-11T06:53:41","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T06:53:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=39792"},"modified":"2017-12-11T06:53:42","modified_gmt":"2017-12-11T06:53:42","slug":"its-time-to-hold-the-big-4-firms-of-accountants-to-account","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2017\/12\/11\/its-time-to-hold-the-big-4-firms-of-accountants-to-account\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s time to hold the Big 4 firms of accountants to account"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I did not have time, when so much else was going on, to report the publication of the EU Panama Paper's Committee report last week. It's time to make amends. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.europarl.europa.eu\/committees\/en\/pana\/home.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">whole thing is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I had a particular involvement on this committee\u00a0 as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guengl.eu\/news\/article\/gue-ngl-report-lays-bare-the-secretive-tax-evasion-practices-of-the-big-fou\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">co-author with Saila Stausholm of a report on the Big 4 accountants<\/a> that was always intended to feed into the committee's deliberations. This it did. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.europarl.europa.eu\/cmsdata\/134368\/A8-0357_2017_EN.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">In the findings this was noted<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2017\/12\/11\/its-time-to-hold-the-big-4-firms-of-accountants-to-account\/screen-shot-2017-12-10-at-21-49-46\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-39794\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-39794\" src=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-10-at-21.49.46-550x721.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"721\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-10-at-21.49.46-550x721.png 550w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-10-at-21.49.46-229x300.png 229w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-10-at-21.49.46-768x1006.png 768w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-10-at-21.49.46-305x400.png 305w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-10-at-21.49.46.png 1256w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>And this clearly had an impact <a href=\"http:\/\/www.europarl.europa.eu\/cmsdata\/134367\/Draft_Recomendation_B8_660_2017.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">on the recommendations made<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2017\/12\/11\/its-time-to-hold-the-big-4-firms-of-accountants-to-account\/screen-shot-2017-12-10-at-21-39-51\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-39793\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-39793\" src=\"http:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-10-at-21.39.51-550x967.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"550\" height=\"967\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-10-at-21.39.51-550x967.png 550w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-10-at-21.39.51-171x300.png 171w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-10-at-21.39.51-768x1351.png 768w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-10-at-21.39.51-227x400.png 227w, https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Screen-Shot-2017-12-10-at-21.39.51.png 1276w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 550px) 100vw, 550px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I think it quite fair to suggest that conclusions 142 and 146 derived directly from our work and we supported in varying ways all the other conclusions, which were suggested by others as well.<\/p>\n<p>The work Saila Stausholm and I did is now being developed further, working also with Prof Len Seabrooke at Copenhagen Business School,\u00a0 and more theoretical versions will appear in 2018 but it is good to see that it has already had impact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I did not have time, when so much else was going on, to report the publication of the EU Panama Paper&#8217;s Committee report last week.<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2017\/12\/11\/its-time-to-hold-the-big-4-firms-of-accountants-to-account\/\"><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":[67,26,81,101,44,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accountancy","category-accounting","category-auditing","category-big-4","category-europe","category-tax-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39792","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=39792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}