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...

Christian Aid is launching a new phase of its Trace the Tax campaign for greater financial transparency by multinational companies. The charity is asking supporters to help persuade four firms to back its call for accounting reforms which will help poor countries collect more of the tax billions which are rightfully theirs. All four have assets and subsidiaries in developing countries. They are: Vodafone, Unilever, TUI Travel (which owns Thomson and First Choice) and Intercontinental Hotels Group (which owns Holiday Inn). Helen Collinson, Campaigns Manager at Christian Aid said: ‘We are appealing to these companies to support our campaign for greater tax...