Alex Dunnagan

Tax havens, tax avoidance, and government support for businesses during the coronavirus pandemic

9th May 2020 by Alex Dunnagan

Following controversy over the prospect of taxpayer funds being made available to support companies with a history of tax avoidance, there have been calls in the UK and around the world to exclude companies based in tax havens from accessing government support.

Whilst such eye-catching policies are popular, they are likely to be ineffective, according to TaxWatch’s latest report Paying in Equally?

Instead, our report suggests a package of reforms aimed at meeting the government’s goal of ensuring that all who benefit from state support pay in on an equal basis. This includes:

Making tax exiles liable for dividend income tax on profits derived from UK based companies.
Making government support for business repayable if a company is found to be engaging in tax avoidance.
Creating a list of companies ineligible for state support due to involvement in tax avoidance (regardless of whether that avoidance uses a listed tax haven).
Invest resources into tax enforcement to ensure better compliance with anti-tax avoidance legislation.
Mandate the publication of tax data by large, multinational companies.
Making data available to the public on which companies are accessing support schemes and on what terms.

To read the briefing in full, please click here. A PDF version is also available here.

Since publishing, this report has been covered by The Times, Law360, and our Director has published an op-ed on the issue in the New Statesmen, and has been interviewed on talkRADIO.¹

Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash

1The interview on the Alexis Conran shows is at 1145hrs on Sunday 10 May 2020.

Wars, taxes, and excess profits

1st May 2020 by Alex Dunnagan

“The profiteering that cannot be got at by the restraints of conscience and love of country can be got at by taxation.” – US President Woodrow Wilson, 1918.¹

World leaders are using wartime rhetoric in describing the current crisis. Emmanuel Macron has declared that “we are at war”, Donald Trump has referred to the virus as an “invisible enemy”, and Boris Johnson has declared that “we must act like any wartime government and do whatever it takes to support our economy”. This language is not hyperbole.

But what does a wartime government do to support its economy? History shows us that wartime economies often bring with them radical tax innovations. Income tax was first introduced in the Napoleonic Wars, and the PAYE system (pay as you earn) was introduced in the Second World War. In this crisis we have already seen the tax system thrown into reverse to create the Furlough scheme.²

One tax that has featured in previous wars is the excess profits tax, which economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have argued should be imposed by the US Federal Government as part of the response to the current pandemic.³ They rightly note that while many businesses will suffer, some will see profits increase.

In this article we take a look at what governments did in the past in relation to excess profits taxes – and how these taxes operated in practice.

In the First World War the British government saw that certain industries were doing well out of the conflict, particularly the arms manufacturers, and introduced an excess profits tax of 50 per cent of profits above the normal pre-war level. The rate was raised to 80 per cent in 1917. In 1921, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Austen Chamberlain terminated the excess profits duty.

An excess profits tax is a tax levied on profits in excess of what is considered “normal”. While every iteration of this form of tax has been slightly different, the general rule is that an average from a pre-war period is taken. For example, Canada’s World War Two excess profits tax exempted “normal” profits taken as an average between 1936 and 1939.⁴ Administered under what is known as the “war-profits principle”, this tax is designed to recapture wartime increases over normal peacetime profits.

Various different rules and exemptions have been made in the past, for matters such as the size of the business, if the income is derived from investments, or to allow for depreciation of assets. In the First World War, in the UK a deduction of £200 per annum was allowed in the case of every business, which was subsequently increased in the case of small businesses. Administration of this tax went without serious friction, with taxpayers considering it part of their patriotic duty.

The UK wasn’t alone in introducing an excess profits tax during the Great War. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Italy, and the United States of America all introduced similar taxes. The goal was the same – to help pay for the war, and to ensure that no one outrageously benefited from a situation in which the country at large suffered.

Throughout the Second World War the excess profits tax was reintroduced. The debate in Parliament throughout the war was not over whether there should be an excess profits tax, but if the tax should stand at 100 per cent or not.

During his 1941 Budget speech, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood, stated that “The yield of National Defence Contribution and Excess Profits Tax exceeded the estimate of £70m by no less than £26m”, and that “The large surplus is due mainly to the public-spirited manner in which many firms and companies have paid over the estimated tax due from them without waiting for the figures to be finally agreed.”⁵

Wood went on to explain that the measure “is directed primarily to taking the profit out of war and ensuring that in war-time, when the whole nation has to bear sacrifices, the increased production which the war requires will not become the means of enrichment that it did in the last war.”⁶

Taxation to pay for war has been fairly popular so long as the war in question is popular too. Once you unite the people in a common cause, they have historically been quite happy to pay for it. Covid-19 is not a war of choice. If governments wanted to introduce measures such as excess profits taxes, it is likely that they would face little opposition from the public.

Photo by A Perry on Unsplash

1President Woodrow Wilson, Session of 65^th Congress, 27 May 1918.

2Coronavirus: Employment Support, House of Commons, 19 March 2020, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2020-03-19/debates/A72357FF-0207-4CE1-A3EF-B5F2D5AE5089/CoronavirusEmploymentSupport

3Jobs Aren’t Being Destroyed This Fast Elsewhere. Why Is That?, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, The New York Times, 20 March 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/opinion/coronavirus-economy-saez-zucman.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

4Canadian Economist Alex Hemingway has recently called for an excess profits tax – Excess profits tax needed to prevent profiteering amid COVID-19, Policy Note, 09 April 2020, https://www.policynote.ca/profits-tax/

5Budget speech, 07 April 1941, https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1941-04-07/debates/047d6100-7faf-4924-bfba-2152f9a19d7b/ReviewOf1940%E2%80%9341

6Ibid

Financial services lobbyists request EU delay anti-avoidance measures

23rd April 2020 by Alex Dunnagan

A consortium of financial services lobbyists has written to the European Commission calling for a delay to the implementation of anti-avoidance measures due to be rolled out on 01 July.¹ As first reported in Law360,² the letter – also sent to the OECD and to Finance Ministers in the EU and the UK – claims that due to the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic, businesses are unable to devote enough time to complete their preparations for the reporting required.

In a separate letter seen by TaxWatch, the European Banking Federation (EBF) requested a three-month postponement of the requirement to provide information on customer bank accounts to tax authorities.

The sixth version of the EU Directive on administrative cooperation, or DAC6, aims to provide the tax authorities of EU Member States and the UK with additional information to assist in closing tax loopholes. DAC6 requires EU and UK intermediaries to file information on “reportable cross-border arrangements” to their home tax authorities. One test of whether an arrangement must be reported is if its “main benefit” is to gain a tax advantage. The definition of what an intermediary includes is broad, and includes any individual or company who sells cross-border tax arrangements, i.e. accountants, tax advisers, lawyers, banks.³ ⁴

The implementation of DAC6 has already been challenging. The way EU directives work is that they set out an objective, and give EU states a choice of how to achieve it.⁵ DAC6 was passed by the European Commission in June 2018, though individual member states were slow to implement the Directive as domestic legislation, with almost half of the EU member states missing the 31 December 2019 deadline to implement DAC6. However, should a member state fail to implement an EU Directive as domestic legislation, the Directive itself acts as a backstop – effectively meaning that regardless of action taken at a national level, businesses should have been aware that DAC6 would be coming into effect.

This is reflected by Big Four accountancy firms that have been recommending for over a year that affected institutions should begin their implementation efforts, even before member states have transported the EU Directive into local law.⁶ ⁷ Despite the two years that relevant parties have had to prepare for DAC6, lobbyists are suggesting that as some people are off work due to having the coronavirus illness, or have childcare duties as a result of school closures, that the intermediaries affected by DAC6 will be unable to comply with the requirements.

The request asks for a postponement of reporting deadlines until 2021, with a review at the end of September 2020 to see if a further extension is required.

The EBF, one of the groups lobbying for a delay of DAC6, wrote separately last week to both the European Commission and the OECD, requesting a three month postponement of the deadline for information exchange under the Common Reporting Standard (CRS). This requirement, based on the US Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, is a global initiative to combat tax evasion, and was implemented in the UK on 01 October 2018. The CRS is used to determine the personal financial information that must be shared regarding assets, income, and taxable amounts across international borders, and is reported annually. The added transparency on a global basis provided by the CRS should allow for enhanced enforcement actions, not only against tax evaders, but also against those involved in money laundering and terrorist financing.⁸

Again, the reason given was that workforces are struggling with technology constraints due to working from home. This request is more controversial, given the fact that the CRS has been in place for several years, and is global in its scope. The other nine signatories of the 20 April request have not put their names to this letter.

This is not the first time that interest groups have sought to use the coronavirus to delay tax measures. Earlier this month we reported on how TechUK, the industry group that represents Facebook and Google amongst others, had asked the UK government for a delay to the start of the Digital Services Tax, saying that companies will be unable to cope with the burden of extra compliance during the crisis. A similar campaign is being waged to defer the Indian digital tax.⁹

The coronavirus pandemic is undoubtedly having an effect on the ability of companies to conduct business. However, given the huge amount of resources required by governments fighting the impacts of the virus, is now really the time to delay measures designed to combat corporate tax avoidance, tax evasion, and money laundering?

The full letter requesting a delay to DAC6 can be found here – Request to European Commission to recommend/endorse the deferral of EU DAC6 reporting obligations

Photo by Calvin Hanson on Unsplash

1The associations who signed the letter, dated 20 April 2020, are ACC, AFME, AIMA, EACB, EBF, EFAMA, EFSA, ESBG, Insurance Europe and Invest Europe.

2EU Should Suspend New Anti-Avoidance Rules, Lobbyists Say, Law360, 21 April 2020, https://www.law360.com/financial-services-uk/articles/1265736/eu-should-suspend-new-anti-avoidance-rules-lobbyists-say?about=financial-services-uk

3Council Directive 2018/822/EU of 25 May 2018, https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/dac-6-council-directive-2018_en.pdf

4DAC6: EU Mandatory Disclosure Regime, Deloitte, https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/tax/articles/dac6-eu-mandatory-disclosure-regime.html

5A good explainer of how EU Directives work has been produced by Full Fact, How the EU works: EU law and the UK, Full Fact, 11 March 2016, https://fullfact.org/europe/eu-law-and-uk/

6EU Mandatory Disclosure Requirements – Update, KPMG, 08 February 2019, https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/insights/2019/02/etf-394-eu-mandatory-disclosure-requirements-update.html

7DAC6: The clock is ticking… Less than 1 year until go-live, Deloitte, 02 July 2019, https://blogs.deloitte.ch/tax/2019/07/dac6-the-clock-is-ticking.html

8The OECD common reporting standard (CRS): FATCA is going global, Gibson Dunn, 11 June 2015, https://www.gibsondunn.com/wp-content/uploads/documents/publications/Schmid-Grunert-OECD-common-reporting-standard-BLM-02.2015.pdf

9Tech giants such as Google, Facebook seek to defer Indian digital tax – sources, Reuters, 31 March 2020, https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-india-tax-digital/tech-giants-such-as-google-facebook-seek-to-defer-indian-digital-tax-sources-idUKKBN21I1XY

bet365 and tax havens

1st April 2020 by Alex Dunnagan

Gambling is big business. The boss of bet365, Denise Coates, has been in the press recently for paying herself the staggering amount of £323m (£277m in salary plus £46m in dividends) last year, the equivalent of £1.3m per working day. £235bn in bets have been wagered through her company over the past five years, making it one of Britain’s largest bookies, generating some £684m in post-tax profits last year alone. With a net worth estimated at £9.3bn, Coates is thought to be one of the largest taxpayers in the UK.¹ The Stoke based betting giant saw its post tax profits rise from £52m in 2009 to £685m in 2019.

However, scrutiny of the bookmaker’s accounts appear to show hundreds of millions of pounds a year in revenue generated in tax havens. In this article we delve into why this might be happening.

Almost every stock-market quoted gambling company gives a breakdown of its revenue. Family-owned bet365 doesn’t, stating in their accounts that “A geographical analysis of turnover has not been given, as in the opinion of the directors, such disclosure would be severely prejudicial to the interests of the group.” Analysts in 2018 estimated that three-quarters of revenue came from international sources.²

While the accounts are certainly not what you would call transparent, some idea of overseas earnings can be gleaned by looking at the company’s tax disclosures. Over the past five years, bet365 has seen a reduction of £176m in their corporation tax bill through what is listed as a “difference in tax of overseas subsidiaries”.

What this means is that bet365 has seen a 30% decrease in their tax bill versus what it would have been had all bets been processed in Britain, from £550m to £373m, thanks to profit generated in countries with a lower corporation tax rate than the UK. Though the amount of revenue generated in “overseas subsidiaries” is not listed in the publicly held accounts, in order to see a reduction of £176m the amount of overseas revenue must be in the billions.

Though bet365 has gambling licenses in 14 jurisdictions, the only ones with a lower corporation tax rate than the UK are Bulgaria, Cyprus, Ireland, and Gibraltar (combined population of 13m). bet365 would have to post pre-tax profits of £1.763bn in Gibraltar or Bulgaria over a five year period, jurisdictions with a corporation tax rate of 10%, in order to see a reduction of £176m in the company’s corporation tax bill. Should these profits be declared in Cyprus or Ireland, at a 12.5% corporate tax rate, the amount would have to be even higher. Either bet365 is making vast sums of money from these small jurisdictions, or another explanation is that they are using these jurisdictions to take bets from markets in which they have no license to operate.

There is much speculation online about bet365 operating in unregulated markets.³ ⁴ Ralph Topping, a former chief executive at William Hill, says bet365 probably operates in many grey markets: “They have more risk appetite than puritanical companies.”⁵

A Guardian investigation from 2014 revealed that Chinese citizens had been arrested after gambling on bet365’s website, with the company frequently changing its Chinese web address in order to side-step regulation. The report goes on to claim that the bookmaker has a call centre in Stoke employing Chinese-speakers.⁶ Along with Fixed Odds Betting which is popular in the UK, bet365 also offer Asian Handicap betting, a type of gambling which is hugely popular in China. In response, bet365 said at the time:

“There is no legislation that expressly prohibits the supply of remote gambling services into China by operators who are based outside China. bet365 has no people, assets or infrastructure in China and does not engage any agents, aggregators or intermediaries, for any purpose, in China.

“In the view of bet365, and its lawyers, Chinese law does not extend to the provision of services into China by gambling operators and service providers who themselves have no nexus with the territory. Any allegation of illegality on the part of bet365 is therefore untrue.”

When we used a virtual private network to make it appear as though we were based in China, we found no difficulty in accessing bet365’s website.

In 2019, another British gaming company was unequivocally found to be operating in grey markets. The boss of GVC, responsible for betting giant Ladbrokes Coral and Foxy Bingo, apologised to the Nevada Gaming Commission for operating in Turkey, where gambling is restricted. Nevada regulators chastised the chief executive, calling him “lackadaisical” about GVC’s operations in Turkey.

Is bet365 operating in grey markets and moving hundreds of millions in profits through low-tax jurisdictions each year? Until bet365 is more transparent, we will never know.

We emailed bet365 to ask how much they generate in revenues from countries in which they don’t hold a license. The company has not responded to our request for comment.

Photo by Chris Kendall on Unsplash

1The Sunday Times Tax List 2020: meet Britain’s top 50 tax payers, 26 January 2020, 2019, available here; https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sunday-times-tax-list-2020-uk-taxpayers-nhs56k95d

2bet365 stands out among rivals for more than pay, available here; https://www.ft.com/content/f40e1b44-ee60-11e8-89c8-d36339d835c0

3Are Chinese punters big users of bet365? The firm still won’t say, 21 November 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2018/nov/21/are-chinese-punters-big-users-of-bet365

4UK gambling market comes under siege, 09 February 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/7eed86fc-4354-11ea-a43a-c4b328d9061c

5bet365 stands out among rivals for more than pay, 22 November 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/f40e1b44-ee60-11e8-89c8-d36339d835c0

6Revealed: how bet365 profits from Chinese punters who risk jail for gambling online, 03 October 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/oct/03/bet365-profit-china-online-gambling

Covid 19 – Pope says tax avoiders have committed “murder”

25th March 2020 by Alex Dunnagan

In an interview last week with the Italian daily “La Repubblica”, Pope Francis held tax dodgers partially responsible for the struggle Italian health services are now going through in trying to deal with covid.¹ The coronavirus has hit Italy the hardest, with close to 7,000 deaths at the time of writing, more than double that of any other country.

As health services are being overwhelmed around the world, and members of the Vatican staff test positive for the virus, Pope Francis backed a prominent journalist’s complaint that tax avoiders are partly at fault for the current healthcare crisis.

Speaking over the phone while isolating in the Vatican, Pope Francis said he was “very impressed” by an article by journalist Fabio Fazio.² The Pope went on to quote from the article in saying:

“He is right, for example, when he says: “It has become evident that those who do not pay their taxes are not only committing a crime, but murder: if there are not enough hospital beds or respirators, they too are partly to blame”. I was very impressed by this”.*

Italian Treasury estimates believe tax evasion costs the state some 107.5 billion euros a year³. An annual report by the European Commission has Italy’s VAT gap, sometimes referred to as a compliance gap, at 24% in 2017, the most recent year for which statistics are available. Italy’s gap is one of the highest in Europe – the UK’s for example sits at 11%.⁴

Pope Francis has been vocal on tax issues in the past, referring to “tax havens for private and corporate profits” as recently as February of this year.²

In response to the Pope’s interview, Fazio tweeted that he was overcome with emotion, and that Pope Francis invited all of us not to waste this difficult time but to use it to look at ourselves and renew ourselves

These testing times may well leave behind a different world politically and economically. Whether or not it will be a better one, only time will tell.

Photo by Sins S on Unsplash

*Translators note: Fabio Fazio’s words on tax avoiders and evaders appeared as one of 15 points in an article entitled “The things I am learning”. The full text in Italian of point 7 is as follows:

7. È diventato evidente che chi non paga le tasse non commette solo un reato ma un delitto: se mancano posti letto e respiratori è anche colpa sua.

We have translated “delitto” as “murder”. “Delitto” in Italian can refer to a number of serious crimes, including murder, it is sometimes translated as “felony”. The word “reato” is also translated as a crime, but in the more general sense. Reuters, when reporting on the Pope’s citation of the article used this distinction in their translation. “It has become evident that those who do not pay taxes do not only commit a felony but also a crime”.

We do not feel this translation works in British English. The world felony denotes a subset of crime, so a felony can not be “also” a crime. The word felony is also not in common usage in Britain. The Cambridge Italian-English Dictionary defines “commettere un delitto” as “to commit a murder”. Given the context, of this article and the use of the verb “commette” in the original article, we felt that the translation – “not only committing a crime, but murder” was the correct translation in English. Translation by George Turner.

1Pope Francis on Coronavirus crisis, La Repubblica, 18 March 2020, available here: https://www.repubblica.it/vaticano/2020/03/18/news/coronavirus_pope_francis-251572693/?ref=search

2Things I’m Learning, La Repubblica, 16 March 2020, available here: https://www.repubblica.it/cronaca/2020/03/16/news/le_cose_che_ho_imparato-251384470/?ref=RHPPTP-BH-I251364842-C12-P22-S2.4-T1

3Report on the Economy Not Observed, 2018, Italian Treasury Report, available here: http://www.mef.gov.it/documenti-allegati/2018/aggiornamento_relazione_2018_x27_novembre_2018x-finale.pdf

4Study and Reports on the VAT Gap in the EU-28 Member States, European Commission, 2019, available here: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/sites/taxation/files/vat-gap-full-report-2019_en.pdf

5Pope Francis: Tax cuts for the rich and tax havens are structures of sin, Rome Reports, 05 February 2020, available here: https://www.romereports.com/en/2020/02/05/pope-francis-tax-cuts-for-the-rich-and-tax-havens-are-structures-of-sin/

6@Fabfazio tweet, 18 March 2020, Twitter, available here: https://twitter.com/fabfazio/status/1240196888701415424?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1240196888701415424&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.repubblica.it%2Fspettacoli%2Fpeople%2F2020%2F03%2F18%2Fnews%2Fcoronavirus_fabio_fazio_intervista_papa_francesco-251595266%2F

Loan Charge Parliamentary Debate

20th March 2020 by Alex Dunnagan

A debate was held in the House of Commons yesterday on the Government Response to the Sir Amyas Morse Review of the Loan Charge. Ahead of this we published an explainer on what disguised remuneration is here, and a more detailed briefing here. David Davis, Ruth Cadbury, and Julian Lewis were able to secure the debate on the motion “That this House believes that the Loan Charge is an unjust and retrospective tax; notes that the law on the Loan Charge was not settled until 2017; and calls on HMRC to cease action on loans paid before 2017.”

The Loan Charge is an anti-tax avoidance measure introduced in the 2016 budget to address tax lost to the Treasury from loan based disguised remuneration schemes.

These schemes involved employees and contractors being paid in loans. As loans do not incur income tax, those using the schemes ended up getting their earnings tax free. The only cost to using a loan scheme was the fees charged by the operators of around about 13%.

As a result, loan scheme users ended up keeping far more of their income than those who paid tax in the usual way.

David Simmonds MP lays out the issue in that “the schemes themselves were lawful because it was lawful to receive a loan, but the money the constituent received was tax-free only if it was genuinely a loan”. Simmonds goes on to say that as 20 years have since elapsed, that there was no evidence that these were genuine loans, hence HMRC’s interest in the schemes. He then goes on to say that taxpayers raised the issue with him that they find it hard to believe that anybody thought that they could describe their pay on a tax return as a “loan”, and because of this never have to pay any income tax on it.

HMRC argues that these loans should really be classed as income because no one had any expectation that they should be paid back, and as such should always have been liable to income tax.

The Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Jesse Norman, described these schemes as “contrived tax avoidance in which people are paid in the form of a loan with no interest and no intention or requirement to pay the loan back.” Many of the schemes saw money routed through offshore companies and trusts.

Norman summarised the case for the charge in saying “it has cost the Exchequer hundreds of millions of pounds a year, and that, of course has two effects. It deprives public services of the money they need to operate, and it forces other taxpayers to pay more in order to make up the shortfall.”

The charge has become one of the most controversial pieces of tax legislation in recent times. A cross-party group of MPs, the Loan Charge All-Party Parliamentary Group has led the fight in campaigning against the Charge. In January of last year the Treasury was forced to agree to review the loan charge proposals, following an amendment to the Finance Act tabled by the Liberal Democrats MP Ed Davey. The former Comptroller and Auditor General Sir Amyas Morse was tasked to lead the independent review

A number of recommendations from Sir Amyas’ report were accepted last December, including halving the time period in which the loan charge would apply, from 20 years to ten. However, many campaigners and Members of Parliament do not believe these measures go far enough. MP’s have argued that the law was not agreed upon until 2017, and are urging the government to go further, with one of the key criticisms being the retrospective nature of the charge.

Adam Smith was frequently quoted in the debate, given that the Financial Secretary to the Treasury had written a book on the economist. The Conservative MP for New Forest West, Sir Desmond Swayne, said that following the principals of taxation put forward by Smith, tax should not be retrospective.

The Financial Secretary to the Treasury disagreed with the characterisation of the tax as retrospective. Mr Norman said of the Loan Charge “it taxes a loan outstanding at a future date. It does not change any law previously on the statute book.”

Peter Dowd MP, speaking on behalf of HM Opposition, stated that Smith also argued to “Take from the taxpayer only that which is needed for the public realm”, and that if people do not pay their taxes, everyone else has to pay more.

Dowd went on to frame the loan charge within the conditions HMRC is facing, referencing that “A third of its staff have gone since cuts in 2005 and later in 2010. Any increases in the cash amounts available to HMRC for its running have, in effect, been blocked”.

While Christian Matheson MP argued “nobody in this House disputes the fact that it was tax avoidance”. This does not appear to be a view shared by all, with Paul Holmes MP stating “the people this affects are not tax avoiders”, and Bob Stewart MP describing his constituents who entered into these schemes as “decent and honest”.

Kevin Hollinrake MP said that those people using such schemes should have been aware that entering into a scheme where you can lower or eradicate your tax bill was wrong. In an intervention during the speech of David Davis, Hollinrake said “If something looks too good to be true, it usually is? In my business, we have been brought this kind of scheme a number of times by our advisers over the last 30 years, maybe with a barrister’s letter saying, “Don’t worry. It’ll be fine. You can reduce your tax bill hugely by adopting this scheme.” We have always rejected them because we knew the risk.”

Both the advisers who ran the schemes and HMRC came in for criticism during the debate. It was argued that instead of charging the individuals that took out these loans, that HMRC should instead be pursuing the advisers who sold them. Paul Holmes MP stated, “many people were advised by financial advisers and are now being penalised because of the late realisation and intransigence of HMRC”. David Davis went further, in calling the advisers and employers who facilitated the loans “villains”.

In Norman’s final remarks, he summarised the argument as thus “If one asks the average man or woman in this country, I think they would say, “Everyone should pay their fair share of taxes. People are responsible for their own tax affairs. Real loans get repaid; if someone offered you a loan for which no repayment, no tax and no interest was due, it would probably be too good to be true.” And so it is.”

Despite this – the motion from the Back Bench committee asking that the loan charge only applies to loans taken out after 2017 was agreed to. Where this leaves the government is unclear.

The debate is available on Parliament Live here.

Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash

Netflix tax affairs debated in the House of Commons

4th February 2020 by Alex Dunnagan

An adjournment debate on Netflix’s tax affairs was held in the House of Commons last night in response to research conducted by TaxWatch. Rt Hon Dame Margaret Hodge, Labour MP for Barking and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Responsible Tax, called Netflix’s tax structure “scandalous, intolerable, and unfair.”

Dame Margaret called for video streaming services to be included in the government’s new Digital Services Tax. Currently, the DST excludes companies like Netflix from the charge.

She went on to say that as a great deal of Netflix’s intellectual property is developed in the UK, with the aid of creative tax reliefs, it is only right that the profits generated are subjected to UK corporation tax. Dame Margaret questioned why the eligibility criteria for creative industry tax relief cannot be adjusted to insist that any company receiving credits must declare their revenue earned in the UK via a UK company.

Dame Margaret gives Brazil as an example of a country that successfully taxes Netflix – by using a withholding tax – asking “If Brazil can tax Netflix, why can’t we?”

Financial Secretary to the Treasury, Rt Hon Jesse Norman MP, thanked Dame Margaret for raising the issue, calling it an “interesting and important topic that is of great public import”. In response to the points raised he said: “The Government does recognise that some multinational businesses have sought to avoid paying their fair share of tax in the UK by entering into contrived arrangements to divert profits to low tax jurisdictions.” However, he stressed that by law, ministers are “never privy to information about the tax affairs of specific companies or individuals.”

In response to the suggestion that Netflix is paying no UK tax while receiving creative reliefs, Mr Norman stated that businesses should be “incentivised” to invest in the UK’s creative economy.

Mr Norman went on to say “It is equally right that HMRC should subject large businesses to an appropriate level of scrutiny and my understanding is they are actively investigating around half of the UK’s large businesses at any given time.”

Responding to the point regarding the DST, Mr Norman stated that in order to include Netflix, tax rules would have to be rewritten, as the DST is currently aimed at search engines and social media, and that “the DST is intended to be a temporary measure pending agreement of a long-term global solution”. This is in reference to the OECD’s digital tax plans for multinationals, which are not yet set in stone.

With regard to taxing intellectual property, Mr Norman said “under international tax rules, the UK is entitled to tax the shares of a company’s profits that relate to those production activities…so she should not have concern on that front”

In response to the example of Brazil, Mr Norman makes reference to a tax charge on offshore receipts in respect of intangible property. While this has the potential to be an important tool in stopping multi-nationals from shifting profits offshore, as we pointed out last year, the fact that it is restricted to non-treaty jurisdictions is a severe limitation.

Our recent research revealed that despite having 11.62 million subscribers in the UK last year, generating an estimated £1bn in revenues and £68.5 million profit, Netflix Services UK is unlikely to have faced any tax liability because revenues from UK subscribers are booked in the Netherlands and the company in the UK receives tax credits under the creative industry tax relief scheme.

However, as disclosed by the company, Netflix’s 2018 UK tax return is currently under examination by HMRC.

The debate is available on Parliament Live here.

Photo by Marcin Nowak on Unsplash

Rockstar takes the pot – 2019 accounts show huge increase in Grand Theft Auto tax claim

19th January 2020 by Alex Dunnagan

Rockstar North, the Edinburgh based company behind the wildly successful Grand Theft Auto series, has published its latest accounts, revealing a huge increase in claims for Video Games Tax Relief.

As reported in today’s Sunday Telegraph, analysis by TaxWatch shows that the claim was by far the largest for Video Games Tax Relief granted by HMRC in 2018/19, accounting for 37% of all claims made by the UK video games industry in that year.

The claim means that for the fourth year running the company has paid no UK Corporation Tax, despite the Rockstar group racking up more than $6bn sales of Grand Theft Auto V since it was released in 2014.

The accounts for 2019 show that the company claimed £37.6m in Video Games Tax Relief, taking its total to £80m since the scheme was introduced. Of the 1,110 claims made since VGTR was launched, Rockstar have accounted for a quarter of all the relief claimed from the government, whilst publishing only two games that qualify for the relief.

The claim is believed to relate to the production of the next edition of GTA, rumoured to be scheduled for release soon. Rockstar North is the lead developer for the series, although Rockstar has also registered Red Dead Redemption 2 as being ‘Culturally British’, the pre-requisite required to qualify for the relief. Studios are able to make interim claims for VGTR before a game is completed, and the huge claims being put in by Rockstar are likely related to the production costs of GTA VI. As VGTR is related to production spend, the large claim indicates the scale of Rockstar’s spending on games development.

When VGTR was introduced, the government estimated that the new relief would cost in the region of £35m a year, and support smaller games developers. The scheme is now costing in excess of £100m a year, with close to half of all relief being claimed by just four companies.

Figures published by HMRC on all Video Games Tax Credit claims show just how large Rockstar’s share of the pot is. In 2018-19 there were 345 VGTR claims for a total of £103m.¹ While these numbers may change, as companies have a period of one year to submit returns and another year to amend a claim, evidence from previous years suggest that the total claims are unlikely to change much from the published figures. The share of this pot going to Rockstar North, which was already significant, has increased from 18% in 2018 to 37% in 2019.

Of the 345 VGTR claims last year, 315 of them were for less than £1m, for a total of £30m. Rockstar North’s claim is worth more than the value of all of these 315 claims combined. There were 29 claims (excluding Rockstar) of over £1m, totalling £35.4m. And then there is Rockstar at £37.6m, which managed to claim more than 50% of the entire amount granted to games claiming more than £1m in relief. In fact, the stats tell us that Rockstar claimed at least five times the amount of its next biggest rival in 2019, making it by far the largest production in the UK that year.

We await to see whether any profit from this huge investment by the UK taxpayer makes its way back to the UK.

Photo by John Sting on Unsplash

1 Data taken from ‘Video Games Table 4.4’, from the August 2019 HMRC Publication ‘Creative Industries Statistics’, available here; https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/826824/August_2019_Commentary_Creative_Industries_Statistics.pdf

This article was amended on 20th January 2020 to reflect the fact that Rockstar had also gained certification of Red Dead Redemption 2 as being “culturally British”.

The hangover after the double Irish

3rd January 2020 by Alex Dunnagan

On New Year’s Eve Google announced that it will be shutting down its double Irish tax avoidance scheme. This double Irish that has cost governments around the world billions in lost tax revenues since it was set up in 2004.

The scheme relied on putting intellectual property rights in Bermuda, and making huge payments to Google’s Bermuda company for the right to use that IP. Now Google is moving the intellectual property back to the United States, where it belongs.

However, the closure of the scheme is not likely to lead to any more tax revenues outside the United States and threatens to undermine efforts to reform the international tax system.

Our Director, George Turner, sets out what the closure of the scheme means for international tax reform and tax revenues in countries where Google operates in an article for the New Statesman published today. Click here to read the full story.

Photo by Mitchell Luo on Unsplash

A Manifesto for Tax Equality

7th November 2019 by Alex Dunnagan

A manifesto for tax equality has been launched by a coalition of organisations calling on politicians to address tax inequality, curb tax avoidance and improve the administration of the tax system.

After ten years of cuts to public spending, there is now widespread consensus that more investment in public services is required. In this election, all of the main political parties are committing to major increases in public spending.

This manifesto provides practical policies on how to tackle the problem, and raise more funds in an equitable way.

This manifesto was produced by Tax Justice UK and TaxWatch with help from a number of leading academics. It is endorsed by the Equality Trust, Tax Research UK, the Women’s Budget Group and Church Action on Tax Justice. The lead authors were Robert Palmer (tax inequalities), George Turner (avoidance and evasion), and Paul Hebden (tax administration). The policies that we have costed could raise £69 billion, although the package of reforms, which includes measures where detailed costings are unavailable, could raise significantly more.

Read the full manifesto here.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

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