The Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) and IBIS has the pleasure of inviting you to a Global Economy Monday Seminar on:
Combating Tax Avoidance by Multinational Corporations in Poor Countries: Will Country-by-Country Reporting Do the Job?
Wednesday, 8 September 2010, 13.00-15.00
Danish Institute for International Studies
Main Auditorium
Strandgade 71, ground floor, 1401 Copenhagen K
Background
“Tax avoidance is a global problem. It involves the abusive exploitation of gaps and loopholes in domestic and international tax law that allow multinational companies to shift profits from country to country, often to or via tax havens, with the intention of reducing the tax they pay on some or all of their profits. Tax avoidance on such a large scale is facilitated by a lack of transparency in the way multinational companies report and publish their accounts. Making multinational companies more transparent would help tackle tax avoidance at very low cost” (Raymond Baker, director of Global Financial Integrity, 2009).
At present, most multinational companies publish their accounts as unified entities with no geographical data on where they work or what their financial performance is in the different countries they work in. This makes it impossible to know whether companies are paying a fair share of taxes in the countries they operate in or not. It has been estimated that the loss of corporate taxes, as a result of corporate tax evasion practices, amounts to $160 billion a year in developing countries, or almost 1.5 times the total amount of development assistance.
Country-by-country reporting is a new system of accounting for multinational corporations that strives to enhance transparency and to ensure that more tax is paid in developing countries. By requiring multinational corporations to account for the sales, profits and taxes paid in all the jurisdictions in which they operate, it will be possible for a wide range of stakeholders to monitor tax payments and illicit practices (such as transfer mispricing between internal companies in a corporation) and use this information as a basis for changing local tax arrangements. However, sceptics argue that changing accounting standards for multinational corporations would be too costly for corporations and too complicated for auditors– in short, that it is unrealistic.
Our speaker at this seminar, Richard Murphy, is the director of Tax Research LLP, one of the foremost experts in the world on country-by-country reporting and the author of the comprehensive report: Country-by-Country Reporting – Holding multinational corporations to account wherever they are (2009). Richard Murphy will present the technicalities of country-by-country reporting, discuss its pros and cons and the possibilities for its implementation.
Richard Murphy is a chartered accountant and graduate economist. He trained with KPMG in London before setting up his own firm of chartered accountants in 1985 in London. He and his partners sold the firm in 2000 when it had 800 clients. Murphy has written widely on taxation and accounting, and been increasingly involved in taxation policy issues since 2000. He is a founder of the Tax Justice Network and director of Tax Research LLP which undertakes work on taxation policy for a wide range of clients including governments, government agencies, commercial organizations, aid agencies and pressure groups in the UK and abroad. He is research fellow at the Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex and at the Tax Research Institute at the University of Nottingham.
Programme
13.00-13.10 Introduction
Jakob Vestergaard, Senior Researcher, DIIS
13.10-14.00 Country-by-Country Reporting – Holding Multinational
Corporations to Account Wherever They Are
Richard Murphy, Director, Tax Research LLP, Norfolk, UK
14.00-14.20 Coffee Break
14.20-15.00 Open Discussion
Chair: Jakob Vestergaard, Senior Researcher, DIIS
Practical Information
The seminar will be held in English.
Participation is free of charge, but registration is required. Please use below online registration form no later than Tuesday, 7 September 2010 at 12.00 noon. |
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