October 17th, 2014
The EU Savings Tax Directive (EUSTD) has been the EU’s flagship transparency initiative since its introduction in 2003, and we have written about it on many occasions. It complements another EU transparency scheme called the Directive on Administrative Co-operation, which was beefed up this week, as the
Wall St. Journal reported:
“European Union finance ministers agreed Tuesday on a far-reaching crackdown on tax evasion that will bring the bloc’s standards on par with global rules by 2017, although Austria is getting an extra year to build up a data-exchange system with its banks.”
The DAC currently covers only EU Member states, while the EUSTD is extended by agreement...
October 8th, 2014
The indefatigable US-based organisation
Good Jobs Firsthas sent a fascinating email, which relates to the United States but could have general relevance for other countries. This one is located at the fascinating, busy intersection between tax and transparency.
June 25th, 2014
The IMF has a major new Policy Paper out entitled
Spillovers in International Taxation, looking at the effects that one country’s tax rules and practices can have on others.
Of course the IMF would never be so rude to some of its most powerful member states as to explicitly
say what is in our headline – but that’s what we read between the lines. “Spillovers” in international tax are all about tax haven activity, particularly when those spillovers are deliberately crafted.
Now that we’ve read it, we conclude that this is a really important document. It tears...
June 12th, 2014
Four years ago
the Tax Justice Network wrote about FIFA’s so-called African “tax bubble” where FIFA was forcing a poor African country to forego its potential football tax revenues in order to funnel yet more money into FIFA’s gilded Zürich headquarters and its lucrative empire. We quoted Professor Han Kogels of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, who said:
“They want to create their own tax haven. A fully exempt situation. That is, FIFA and its FIFA subsidiaries that are fully exempt from any tax whatsoever levied at every level – state level, municipal level. All sorts of taxes: consumption taxes, income taxes...
