Financial Transparency Coalition

I reported yesterday that the zero / 10 tax regimes adopted by all three of the Crown Dependencies have failed the test set by the European Commission for compliance with the EU Code of Conduct for Business Taxation (Guernsey has failed by default). There are those who do, of course, wish to ignore the news and that is their prerogative. I admit that this is a leak, but one which I’m entirely confident is right. Failure on three out of five counts is a dramatic rejection of the deliberately abusive structure of zero...

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...

From Christian Aid: Developing countries’ urgent need to boost their tax revenues in order to fund schools, hospitals and the fight against poverty won welcome backing today from Europe, says Christian Aid. ‘We’re delighted to see that the European Commission has really woken up to the power of tax,’ said Dr David McNair, Christian Aid’s Senior Adviser, Economic Justice. ‘It is highly significant that it has explicitly recognised poor countries’ need for higher tax revenues in order to achieve Millennium Development Goals such as halving extreme poverty and hunger and reducing child...

The European Commission issued a paper this week entitled “Tax and Development: Cooperating with Developing Countries on Promoting Good Governance in Tax Matters”. Amongst its commentary is the following:

In order to enhance transparency and facilitate access of relevant data by tax administrations in developing countries, there is an increasing interest in a country-by-country reporting (CBCR) standard for multinational corporations operating in developing countries. The Commission supports the timely conclusion of ongoing work being done by the OECD with respect to a CBCR guideline, which should then be referred in the OECD Guidelines for...