"The B-Team: Lowering the bar for tax transparency?", 16 Feb 2018

...The one thing lacking so far in the process towards public country-by-country reporting has been a champion among the major multinationals – and that’s exactly who the B Team work with. Moreover, they have made some genuine progress towards beneficial ownership transparency for their own group structures. 

...the B Team... make the broad case for the importance of tax – including as critical to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals...We should celebrate the progress that this embodies. 

...The B Team report identifies seven principles... principles 1-6 is ok, commitments to comply with the law, or existing positions on beneficial ownership transparency, don’t exactly move the needle. And crucially on transparency, what is immediately clear is that the B Team principle – despite making most of the right noises – stops well short of requiring any kind of consistent reporting. 

...The B Team’s members have committed themselves to worthy principles that lack any consistent transparency, and therefore any hard criteria against which to evaluate progress. Given the range of standards and proposals out there that have moved beyond this, it is – sadly – evident that the ‘new bar’ is a lower bar.

...We invite the B Team to revisit this work with urgency, and to seek their members’ agreement to – at the minimum – come up to existing standards of tax transparency. We remain happy to engage on this. Ideally the B Team would join with the many engaged groups in the Open Data for Tax Justice hub, and become champions for public country-by-country reporting.