Financial Transparency Coalition

LONDON — Over the past fortnight, Vodafone stores across Britain have been blockaded by pro­testers wielding banners with the slogan “tax dodgers”. Orchestrated with the help of social media, the campaigners focused on a comparison between swingeing welfare cuts in the UK and what they claimed was Vodafone’s £6bn unpaid corporate tax bill – in spite of the figure being dismissed as an “urban myth” by HM Revenue & Customs. “If the rich paid their tax, you wouldn’t need to make a single cut to any essential service,” read one placard.

Vanessa Houlder has written an excellent article in the Financial Times this morning on the subject of tax and reputational risk. As she notes:

One lesson for companies is clear: tax is becoming an important source of reputational risk. Increasingly, businesses are weighing up whether they are vulnerable to attack and how they should respond if they become the target of a campaign.

The article has, of course, been inspired by the latest Vodafone protests,but it is much broader in it’s focus than that. It does, in particular, look at the tax...

Twenty besuited men and women shuffle and blink around a large conference table at 9 am in the heart of the City of London, with almost panoramic views from their fourth floor room. To the unknowing eye this might seem like the start of yet another corporate board meeting. Yet these people hold power not only over the future of a company, but the lives of literally hundreds of millions of people living in poverty around the world. This is the International Accounting Standards Board’s (IASB) October meeting, and the first item on the agenda is its ‘extractive activities’ project....

LONDON—Christian Aid is calling on the winner of this Sunday’s general election in Tanzania to commit to ending tax anomalies that have deprived a country rich in mineral resources of badly needed revenue that could have been spent on schools, hospitals and other infrastructure improvements.