Financial Transparency Coalition

The Sunday Times did an expose of Google’s tax affairs Sunday. I’ll declare an interest: they asked me to help the investigation, and I did. The findings? Google has avoided £3 billion of tax worldwide over the last five years. It’s tax rate outside the USA is just 3%. In 2009, if Google had declared profits in proportion to sales in the UK in the ratio that the worldwide accounts showed (about 35% profit pre tax) then the expected UK tax bill would have been about £190 million.

Hillary Clinton made an extraordinary speech to the OECD on aid today. It went far beyond anything I might have expected. The whole thing is here. The important highlights are as follows, in my opinion:

There are many urgent issues we could discuss today, but I want to focus on two. First, partnering with developing countries on reforms in three interconnected areas – taxes, transparency, and corruption – because focusing on these three will give us the tools needed to enable more countries to fund more of their own development. And second, doing more to support women as...

The Monetary Affairs Committee of the EU Parliament has sent the following letter to the European Commission:

Mr Michel Barnier Commissioner for Internal Market and Services European Commission Rue de la Loi 200 B-1049 Brussels 25 May 2011 Country by Country Reporting Dear Commissioner Barnier We wanted to thank you for taking the time to meet with some of us last week in Strasbourg and for your continued positive engagement on country-by-country reporting and your public commitment to come forward with legislative proposals later this year . Before those proposals are published, we would like to reiterate a few key points from our meeting which we hope...

Rarely have developing countries been more vocal and united on a question of international taxation. The vexed question of the status of the arcane-sounding “Committee of Experts on International Cooperation in Tax Matters” is hotting up, after rich and poor countries clashed at a United Nations meeting last month. The UN tax committee is charged with promoting international cooperation to deal with important issues such as taxing multinational companies across borders, and sharing best practice between countries. It has a specific mandate to take into account the specific needs of developing countries, which is why developing countries want to see...