The UK government should ‘get tough’ on the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies and introduce public country by country reporting, says a report by the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Responsible Tax, if the OECD's BEPS project is to succeed.
Without full transparency in the tax system, the BEPS action plan will be unable to create the sort of fair global system needed to combat global tax avoidance. The report raises concerns that the OECD recommendations simply patch up existing rules and could bring new and greater complexities to the international tax system.
Dame Margaret Hodge MP, chair of the APPG on Responsible Tax, said, ‘The OECD has done well to build consensus, but the proposals are likely to fail to meet the challenge of tackling global tax avoidance. We need to open up the affairs of global companies to public account if we are to clean up the widespread abuse that pervades so many international businesses’. She added, ‘Corporations, aided by an army of advisors, banks and lawyers, can exploit these rules to avoid paying tax where value is genuinely created’.
The report brands the UK a ‘difficult friend’ of the BEPS process. ‘The government has been facing both ways’, Mrs Hodge said, urging the new prime minister to ‘use the law to end the secrecy that encompasses tax havens’. The government’s unwillingness to force the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies to introduce public registers of beneficial ownership is ‘frustrating’.
The UK government should ‘get tough’ on the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies and introduce public country by country reporting, says a report by the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Responsible Tax, if the OECD's BEPS project is to succeed.
Without full transparency in the tax system, the BEPS action plan will be unable to create the sort of fair global system needed to combat global tax avoidance. The report raises concerns that the OECD recommendations simply patch up existing rules and could bring new and greater complexities to the international tax system.
Dame Margaret Hodge MP, chair of the APPG on Responsible Tax, said, ‘The OECD has done well to build consensus, but the proposals are likely to fail to meet the challenge of tackling global tax avoidance. We need to open up the affairs of global companies to public account if we are to clean up the widespread abuse that pervades so many international businesses’. She added, ‘Corporations, aided by an army of advisors, banks and lawyers, can exploit these rules to avoid paying tax where value is genuinely created’.
The report brands the UK a ‘difficult friend’ of the BEPS process. ‘The government has been facing both ways’, Mrs Hodge said, urging the new prime minister to ‘use the law to end the secrecy that encompasses tax havens’. The government’s unwillingness to force the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies to introduce public registers of beneficial ownership is ‘frustrating’.
