Why should taxpayers support country-by-country reporting?
10 October 2011
Salman Shaheen - ITR
The Task Force on Financial Integrity & Economic Development’s annual conference in Paris last week showed how taxpayers could benefit from a more transparent reporting standard, but activists admitted they must do more to engage companies in the debate.
Delegates heard about the harmful impact of tax avoidance on the developing world and the need for country-by-country reporting to tackle the problem.
Research from the OECD shows 60% of world trade takes place between the member companies of a corporate group and where a significant number of these subsidiaries are located in opaque or tax havens it can be difficult to determine whether companies are paying the right amount of tax in the countries in which they operate.
Richard Murphy, director of Tax Research, argued that it is important to know what tax companies owe, where they owe it and the profits and losses they make in each jurisdiction.
“And we want to know how many people you employ and where,” Murphy said. “We want to know who you exploit. That is what this is about, the poorest people in the world.”
But the argument is not just...
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