Financial Transparency Coalition

Towards the end of last month, Ann Hollingshead blogged about Businesses and Investors against Tax Haven Abuse, a coalition of over 400 small business owners and investors looking to curb the use of tax havens and shell companies by their larger multinational competitors. But how exactly do these multinational entities use tax havens? One method, which takes advantage of the disparity in tax rates between jurisdictions, is transfer pricing. Transfer pricing is an issue that has been described as incredibly lucrative to those involved and...

A May 2010 briefing from Tax Research UK explains the benefits of an international country-by-country reporting standard.

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...