Article
The offshore wrapper: a week in tax justice
[A]new standard for automatic information exchange by the OECD...will allow a system to develop where tax authorities need are automatically provided with the information they need to tax their citizens...[T]he UN High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows...will look...at multi-national corporations operating in Africa...On the other side of the coin is the poor performance of tax authorities in collecting tax...[T]he Ghanaian government...collected taxes from only 2 million people...in a country of 25 million...[T]he Centre for Investigative Reporting in Pakistan show[s] that nearly half of all lawmakers...paid no income taxes...One of the loopholes in the international tax system that [companies] exploit...is VAT on digital goods, which is charged where companies are based. Companies selling to large markets...have been basing themselves in Luxembourg, where VAT is negligible...[T]he European Union wants to move taxing rights to countries where the customers are...[refers to Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook]