Financial Transparency Coalition

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...

I noted the following this morning after Guernsey emailed me about it:

Guernsey plans timing for move to automatic exchange of information Guernsey’s Government has announced that it plans to give financial institutions a window from 1st January 2011 to 1st July 2011 for moving to automatic exchange of information. The Fiscal and Economic Policy Group carried out a public consultation earlier in the summer and this morning Chief Minister Lyndon Trott told the local Parliament, the States of Guernsey, of the planned transition to automatic exchange of information for the equivalent...

My friend, Richard Murphy, has pointed out that India is planning to overhaul its tax code in a dramatic attempt to fight tax evasion and improve tax revenue. From the FT:

India’s government is planning a big shake-up of its archaic tax system in a bid to curb widespread evasion as it confronts a sharply widening fiscal deficit amid expanding social welfare programmes.

The plan, announced by Pranab Mukherjee, the finance minister, aims to foster greater compliance with tax laws by lowering key corporate and personal income tax rates, simplifying...