Financial Transparency Coalition

News reaches me of a meeting of the EU’s Tax Code of Conduct Group, held last week. This Group was established to monitor compliance with the EU Code of Conduct on Business Taxation – established in 1997. Aficionados of this blog will know that in the wake of publication of this Code – with which the UK’s Crown Dependencies are obliged to comply since they are part of the UK for these purposes – The Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey (in that order) announced plans to create what were described as zero/ten...

A new briefing sheet on who might be considered the users of accounts has been published by Tax Research LLP today. It’s available here. The briefing is, of course, produced in response to the International Accounting Standards Board claim that only capital providers can be considered proper uses of financial statements – all other users having to make do with the information capital providers need, as decided upon by the IASB. The paper argues that the IASB is wrong – and goes on to show that their claim is in conflict with their...

I’m in Oslo this morning to talk about the International Accounting Standards Board proposals for accounting for the extractive industries, and those relating to the demand for country-by-country reporting in this sector in particular. The slides I’ll be using are here. I’ll be publishing much more on this issue soon. Suffice to say, that as I note in the slides there are four fundamental problems with the IASB response:

• Their refusal to consider the needs of civil society
• Failure to define materiality appropriately
• Technical incoherence of the response
• The voluntary opt out from disclosure built into...

Introduction I am often asked what I mean by "’tax justice’. As a result, and as a contribution to the Briefing Sheet series I am developing, I have written the following summary of what I think tax justice is. It is also available as a briefing sheet. Tax justice Tax justice is a broadly based concept. It relates to individuals and all taxable entities. But it also relates to tax systems as a whole. Tax compliance – the duty of the taxpayer For the individual taxpayer tax justice is about tax compliance. This happens when...