Financial Transparency Coalition

Recently The European Commission published a report entitled “Transfer pricing and developing countries,” which is meant to assist these countries with addressing the problem. Transfer pricing is the single biggest source of illicit financial flows in the world costing developing countries hundreds of billions of dollars every year. While an assessment of the impact of transfer pricing in developing countries is sorely needed the report was narrowly focussed on the implementation and interpretation of the arms length principle. The arm’s length principle, promoted by the OECD that has proven to be very difficult to implement globally...

Today we would like to highlight two recent blogs from two of Eurodad members, which discuss some positive developments in the tax transparency arena. Firstly, following Action Aid’s recent report on SABMiller and its abusive transfer pricing practices in developing countries, several tax authorities in Africa are conducting further investigations on the company’s operations. “African tax authorities have not only acknowledged the impact of ActionAid’s recent report highlighting tax avoidance by the global brewing company SABMiller, but also committed to doing something new in response to it. Meeting last week to discuss our report under the auspices of the African...

PARIS – The OECD and India have announced plans to strengthen ongoing co-operation on tax-related issues through the development of a three-year partnership that will provide greater opportunities for structured dialogue and sharing of information.

David Spencer, a Senior Advisor to the Tax Justice Network, has just delivered a hard-hitting speech at a major United Nations meeting on transfer pricing, an arcane-sounding but extraordinarily important issue in the field of international tax. Spencer's speech is here. It is an outspoken document, couched in diplomatic language, which contains too much important stuff for us to summarise in detail on this blog - so here is a short summary. Read the whole document for the full effect. Companies can manipulate their internal trade ("transfer") prices...